"We sail," he said. "If you agree. Schedule says Veracruz. The weather behind the line is good."
"We sail," she said. The tugs were released with thanks, and Judd Trahan came on the VHF and said, in his gravel voice, "Pilot, Evangeline, that was some fine work, cher," and she said "Thank you, Judd, you made it look easy," which was a lie they both appreciated, and the Evangeline and the Bayou Rose peeled away into the dark with their deck lights glowing.
Then she said to the captain, "I need about five minutes. Is there somewhere I can pray? I'm late."
Bautista did not ask her anything. He had a Muslim chief cook from Mindanao, it turned out, who prayed in the crew mess, and he simply took her to the small chartroom behind the bridge, a quiet space with a wide table and a shaded lamp, and called the second mate to stand by the conn with her laptop in view, and went out, and closed the door.
She took off her hard hat and set it on the chart table. She had made wudu in the tiny washroom off the bridge with a bottle of water and a paper towel, the way she had done a thousand times at sea. She took the green prayer rug out of the inside pocket of her bag and shook it out and looked at the ship's compass repeater on the bulkhead, and did the calculation she had done since she was a cadet, the great circle bearing from the upper Texas coast to Mecca, a little north of northeast, and subtracted the ship's heading, and laid the rug down on the steel deck at the angle that was left. The ship would turn as it went down the channel and the angle would be wrong in ten minutes. That was all right. God knew which way you meant.
She prayed Maghrib late, three rak'ahs, standing and bowing and kneeling with her forehead on her father's rug, with the deck vibrating gently under her knees from the engine eleven decks down. In the second prostration she found that she was shaking, all over, a fine, fast tremor in her arms and her thighs that she had kept out of her body for an hour and that now arrived, all at once, the way the wind had. She stayed down a little longer than she needed to. She said what she always said. She added the thing she sometimes added, for her father: You were right, Baba. Why not.
She also found, kneeling there, that she was thinking about the guard.
She did not want to be. She noticed it the way she might notice a pebble in her shoe, a small persistent hard spot of attention that she could not quite get rid of. His face in the window. The way he had held her card up to the light and looked from it to her and back again, three times, like a man reading a menu in a language he didn't speak. The way he'd laughed. You're a joke. And then the way his hand had shaken when he gave the card back. She had seen a great many faces in her life that looked at her and saw something other than what was there. Most of them she forgot by the end of the day. She had a feeling she was not going to forget this one, and she did not yet know whether that was because of what he'd said, or because of what had happened on his face when the radio spoke.
She folded the rug and put it back in her bag and went back out onto the bridge and took the Corvina Star twenty-two miles down the channel to the sea buoy, through the long, dark, ordinary night, past the refinery flares and the shrimp boats tied up three deep at the fish docks and the little lighthouse on the jetty, and at eleven-forty she climbed down a rope ladder hung over the ship's steep side to the deck of the pilot boat, which rose and fell on the swell beneath her and caught her at the bottom of a rise exactly when she stepped off, the way it was supposed to, and the Corvina Star went on out into the Gulf without her, her lights getting smaller, bound for Mexico.