Scavengers in the Boneyard

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They come for us with their hacksaws and pipe cutters, their chainsaws and drills. They brace themselves, boots on the rotting pier, and bore into us with their shrieking machinery. We submit to them. We let the yardmen strip us down to our rusted guts and watch the customers barter for our parts. We are the Miss Atlantic and the S.S. Ticonderoga, the Lady Betty and the Sallie Ann. We are the wrecks of the Rossville boneyard, towed here years before these men were born.

The ex-Marine with the hobby sailboat wants a box compass for seventy. The grocer with the rosary tattooed around one ropey bicep wants a gill bracket for eighty. The natty antiques dealer wants a brass bulkhead light for twenty-five, and the college boy with the ginger scruff just wants to take our picture.

The grocer rolls his eyes at the college boy and mouths the word fag to the ex-Marine, who rubs his palms together as he fakes a laugh. The ex-Marine relishes the black grease chapping his knuckles. It feels like an honest day’s work.

For each part the yardmen scavenge, we sink lower into the filth of the Arthur Kill. We wear ribbons of oil that shimmer like dark amethysts. We remember the woman whose jewels flashed at her throat on the ferry, a banker’s mistress who caught glares from secretaries dressed like mourning doves: gray taffeta, brown tweed. We remember the ivory nipple on the end of her parasol, tapping the sunlit deck of the Betsy Ross. At night, the parasol was still. The little buttoned boots crossed tiredly beneath her bench.

We watched the buttoned boots slim down to oxford pumps, the oxfords stretch into stilettos that left deep scars in our varnish. Some of us survived to see the children in moccasins, clutching protest signs heavy with exclamation points. We recognized their mothers, flicking cigarette ash; we recognized their fathers from the City Island yards. Their hands reeked of blood and metal, a smell we recognized again on the sweaty thighs and breasts of Times Square hookers on the ferry at dawn.

These men don’t bother to learn our names. The customer says, How much for the engine telegraph? The yardman says, Boss, you want I should row out to the tugs? They don’t know that the sunken tanker is the Harriet, that her mast used to blot out the sun like a skyscraper. They don’t know that the little tugs stripped bald of all paint are the Eleanor Roosevelt and the Hound of the Baskervilles. They don’t know that the prettiest ferry, the bridal white tiers of her wheelhouse rotted to lace, is the Mary Malone. The yardmen measure us in units of distance, depth, and sweat. The boss, in car payments and private school fees. The grocer keeps glancing at the sculpted arms of the ex-Marine, who introduces himself as Moe, instead of Mohamed. The college boy can’t drag his gaze from the camera’s screen. He clicks through the close-ups of us rapidly – wood swollen with water, nails penetrating pine – until he reaches a naked blonde on a dormitory bed. He fumbles for the lens cap, blushing.

Our harvested parts lie scattered on the dock. The grocer is in a mottled fury, the cords in his neck flushed and erect as he tells the boss where he can stick his buck fifty. We are familiar with this kind of stringy, strutting man, ready for a cockfight as soon as money is on the table. We remember them as nimble in the old schooner sails, understanding us perfectly, without loving us. They would heedlessly risk their lives on the fireboats, bolting into gusts of burning ash. They would knock out a shipmate for winning at cards the next night.

The ex-Marine nudges the box compass scavenged from the Hudson Queen. The charred bone of its needle quivers before it swings back north, like an act of faith. He waits for the grocer to pause for breath, then says he’ll take the compass for eighty, no problem. The ex-Marine worked in finance before September 11th. He is no stranger to negotiation. But even now, he remains ill at ease in the salvage yards and watering holes of his hometown.

He knows that all he has to do is mention Parris Island to see the men’s posture stiffen with respect, their eyes light with camaraderie when they rattle off their division number, name-check Fallujah, Kuwait, Saigon. But floating starboard to this reality is the one where he eats takeout sushi at a conference table, managing a Blackberry with one hand and chopsticks with the other; he is squinting at the glowing screen, oblivious to the dazzling constellations of the Twin Towers’ windows. Floating to port is yet another reality – the parking lot of St. Mary’s. Cleated Timbs nailing him in the kidney. Fucking terrorist and a thin spool of blood in the urine.

We know his kind, too: the boy who runs away to sea. They love us perfectly, without understanding us.

But every kind of man leaves his woman behind. We remember the dredgemen’s wives with their fresh and pimpled girlhood swaddled in shawls, the oilmen’s wives with gold crosses glinting beneath coiled hair. We remember the soldiers’ girls with cherry lips who waved their handkerchiefs as if in surrender. We remember the soldiers’ dead-eyed mothers, arms pressed against their wombs. They all grew smaller on the dock behind us.

We took their dredgemen under the tiara of the Bayonne Bridge and out to the Mud Dump, where they built underwater landscapes – plateaus of Flatbush garbage, hilltops of Greenwich Village cellar dirt – before guiding us home through the channels they had carved for us that day. We took their oilmen out to the great blue silence of the Atlantic. One of us prodded the snorting, heaving tankers through the Narrows with her squat tug’s snout. One of us was stripped of her curved oak benches, where commuters once crossed little buttoned boots, and carted off to Normandy. She felt the men trembling as the gray coast drew closer. She felt the heavy thump of their bodies as they leaned to vomit down her sides.

Some of us moved from port to foreign port for years, carrying sailors who swore fidelity only to us – the Blue Dolphin, the Molly Pitcher, the Mahicanituck and the S.S. Knickerbocker. They left us at night for the young girls in Hong Kong, who, they said, had perfect fragile skin and hair as heavy as tarred rope. They said that the tough brown broads in Marseilles drank bourbon like water. They said that the lithesome artists in Cartagena knew when to scream like they were possessed, when to stop whipping their hair around and feign doe-eyed submission, when to knock off the theatrics already and get busy with their efficient mouths.

But we were the ones they came back to, dawn after dawn, year after year. We were the ones who brought them home, hoary and frail, to Snug Harbor. The nurses tucked them into wooden wheelchairs. They spent the landlocked hours making models of us in bottles, the Nellie P. and the Golden Eagle, the Sallie Ann and the Spirit of Victory. Hunched between the wall with the clock and the wall with the crucifix, they assembled us from memory. Their fingers traced each narrow bottleneck. They slipped inside as far as they could reach.

Now the dock is empty of all women, the salt-blasted boards beginning to collapse. We know that the antiques dealer will take the shapely brass light to the East Village, then snip off the price tag when a leggy queen enters to admire it. We know that the college boy has his phone in hand, our portraits flickering on the screen. The photos are good, his classmates envious. He dodges their hungry questions: why did he choose us? Where did he find us? How did he know to venture beyond the nail salons and bakeries, the curry joints and churches?

We know that the grocer is home, scrubbing rust off the gill bracket. He labors over the Sea Ray that leaks more fuel onto the driveway than it consumes at sea. He had to let his manager go. He no longer spends weekends fishing in the harbor and gutting stripers for the grill. His rosary flexes and shifts across his arm as he works, the jet ink faded to the color of money.

The grocer is holding our body, washing away our blood. The nuns taught him about transubstantiation, but he no longer recalls the word; the concept has become part of him, like his desire for ex-Marines with perfect golden arms. We know that a man like him stops interrogating the warmth that floods him at the sight of other beautiful men, swirling down to the groin like water circling a drain. He accepts that this pressure will not leave him until he is in bed with his wife. He accepts her soft curves as both familiar and strange; he accepts the mystery that she contains the men that he has glimpsed and lost throughout the day.  He has to believe that this is a holy transformation.

We understand. We know that the five boroughs could sink into the sea, but if only the docks survived, you could still make out the silhouette of the missing land. We know that the ex-Marine is guiding his little sloop past the cramped smokestacks of Elizabeth. We know that the box compass is propped on an empty seat. Two years ago, his girlfriend loved to perch across from him, shrieking happily as she dodged the swinging boom. Now, she stays late at the office and later for drinks. She leaves for the ferry before he is awake and refuses to be roused on weekends.

Two years ago, the ex-Marine dropped his tuna wrap and walked out of the lunch meeting, crossed the dusty barricades on Broadway and entered the recruiting station on Chambers Street. Only now is he learning what it means to be left behind.

The ex-Marine sails past the woofer at the mouth of the Arthur Kill. We remember that salty blast of wind, with its notes of burning rubber from Bayonne. We remember skidding across the blue prairie of the bay. The ex-Marine does not need to look at the compass to know that its needle bobs northeast. He has been sailing around the harbor since he was a little boy, and the Statue of Liberty’s heavy-hipped frame is as familiar to him as his girlfriend’s. He floats behind the sloping curves of her generous ass, admiring how she faces out to sea like a sailor, until he remembers that she is not supposed to be poised to leave.

He turns his back on Staten Island to look at the silhouette of the Financial District. He is not thinking about us, the Ticonderoga, the Hudson Queen, the Lady Betty, the American Star, wrecked off the shore where he was born. We are bleached like the bones of whales, silently rotting in the currents that carry him forward.

The water laps gently at the fresh wounds left in our sides today. We are aware of the absence of each stolen part – of the spaces that cannot be filled.

We are aware of the graveyard at Snug Harbor, where the nurses toasted each coffin with brandy as it was borne uphill. We are aware of the ships in bottles that now collect dust in closets and garages and display cases of small forgotten museums. The old sailors had painted our names in gold, gripping the doll-sized brush with both arthritic hands. They had clipped silk string for the rigging. They had trimmed the tiny sails. They had carved our figureheads in miniature: an eagle. A dolphin. A tiny woman with cedar breasts bared, tilting up her blank oval face.

How they must have ached at the sight of us, nearly resurrected, but untouchable behind glass. We looked just as they remembered us. Nothing missing, except them.