Free The Stowaway by Robert Hough

husband’s voice, she squeals. “Oh, Rudy, it
is
you.”
    “Yes, yes, I miss you so much …”
    He can hear the usual clamour in his small house, for even though it is early morning there, the television is playing loudly, and the younger of his children are calling for attention, and the city itself provides a constant backdrop of traffic sounds and raised voices. As sometimes happens when he goes a long time between phone calls home, Maripaz is sniffling and wiping her nose, and then laughing at the silliness of her reaction.
    “Oh, Rudy, I had a feeling that something bad was happening.”
    “No, no, everything is fine.”
    “Really?”
    “Yes, of course, it’s just I’ve been working very hard—they haven’t been giving us shore leave …”
    The phone is snatched from his wife’s hand by his eldest daughter. After a brief conversation—he can’t believe how much like an adult she sounds—Jinky passes the phone to each of his children, right down to the toddler, Joshua. Upon hearing the sound of his baby’s voice, Rodolfo grows suddenly weary. Maripaz comes back on the line, and when she asks the same question as before—“Is everything all right? Are you sure everything’s all right?”—Rodolfo almost tells her about the stowaways.
    Instead he says, “It’s nothing, dear. I’m tired. Very tired. We’re working very hard. The boat—there are some problems with it.”
    Just then, the attendant knocks on the glass door of the booth, holding up fingers to indicate that Rodolfo’s call is getting expensive. Rodolfo nods and says his goodbyes more hastily than normal. He steps into the hallway that divides the shop in two. Outside, the night is hot and humid, and it reminds him of home. He stands still, hating the sensation of being in his own skin. Oddly, he feels as if he’s in a movie—this moment linked to another moment, and that moment to the following moment, and if he could only press fast-forward he’d know why this entire experience requires him to be feeling the way he’s feeling now.
    He goes back to the boat and jots down the details of the last day or two in his logbook. He has dinner, he returns to his cabin, he reads from his Bible before falling asleep. The next morning, at breakfast, he sits with Juanito and Ariel Broas; in between swallows of egg, Juanito says how he’d gone to the Mission to Seafarers the night before, and that the priest there had turned out to be, of all things, a Filipino.
    Later, the three men go to shore together, Juanito heading for the phone shop again, as he had trouble with a phone card the night before and still hasn’t spoken to his wife and children. Thisleaves Rodolfo alone with the Filipino officer. There is a moment of discomfort, for despite the meetings in Juanito’s cabin he still doesn’t know Broas well, and like most people is a little intimidated by the third engineer. Broas nods toward the Mission to Seafarers, and it takes Rodolfo a second to realize that this is an invitation to go with him.
    They walk side by side, not talking. The mission is within the confines of the port, housed in an aluminum-sided building set on blocks. Inside, other sailors are playing cards and drinking beer—Sri Lankans, by the look of them, skinny and dark skinned and wearing shorts. There is also a table full of Greek officers arguing loudly, and some Senegalese crewmen watching football on television. At a table near the corner, seated in front of a mound of paperwork, dressed in light pants and a checked short-sleeve shirt, is a man who could only be the priest that Juanito had mentioned earlier. Broas and Rodolfo approach. They all introduce themselves—the priest’s name is Albano—and sit.
    “Our friend, he told us you were Filipino,” Broas says.
    “Yes,” Father Albano says, “I’m from Manila.”
    “Really?” Broas motions at his own face. “You look more …”
    “Chinese? Yes, I know. Half the time, Filipino soldiers start