Dead Sea (2 page)

George had decided that, as afraid as he was of going out to sea, he wasn’t going to get sick. He wasn’t going to give Saks the satisfaction. He was going to show that loudmouth macho asshole how wrong he was.

And he had. Oh, yes.

That was … until they’d hit the so-called “Graveyard of the Atlantic,” off Hatteras, that place of evil seas and wild weather patterns. The very convergence of the warm Gulf Stream current pushing north and the cold currents sweeping down from Arctic waters. Oil and water, they just did not mix very well. Right away, the sea began to turn choppy and angry, the
Mara Corday
responding with what a sailor might have deemed a gentle roll, but to George was an all-out assault on his stomach. So, without further ado, he very promptly hurled his lunch into the head.

After that, of course, he really got sick.

The others were starting to get a little better by then. But George was lying in his bunk feeling like he’d swallowed a bucket of butterflies. He was nauseous, sweating, shivering … so dizzy he couldn’t even stand up to take a piss. Saks had looked in on him. He couldn’t refuse the opportunity, had a big, shiteating grin on his sunburned, leathery face.

“Not so tough after all, eh, George?”

“Fuck … you,” George managed and then got the dry heaves again.

Saks was his boss — technically, the foreman of the crew — but he seemed to enjoy it when you mouthed off to him. It made him laugh. Made him feel good, George supposed, knowing which buttons to push to totally piss you off. That’s the kind of guy Saks was.

The porter gave George Dramamine and Hyoscine for what ailed him. After a few hours, the worst seemed to be over.

He was able to sit up anyway.

A little while later, gripping the bulkhead of his cabin like a blind man full of whiskey, George actually made it to the porthole and looked out at the sea. It was fairly calm. Yet the ship pitched and yawned like a carnival ride. Maybe it was just him, though.

“Oh, Jesus, what have I gotten myself into?” he asked and sank back into his bunk.

If it wasn’t for the fact that he needed the money, that the bank was about to chew his balls off, he would’ve never signed up for this.

As his eyes closed and he drifted off, he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something about the
Mara Corday
that he just didn’t like.

“We’re making good time,” Cushing said, staring out over the water which almost looked black under the gray March sky. “I’m guessing we’re right on top of the Hatteras Abyssal Plain on the edge of the Sargasso.”

Fabrini rubbed spray from his swarthy face. “What the hell is an abyssal plain, smart guy?”

“Just a submarine plain. Kind of like on land, but this one is about 16,000 feet down,” Cushing explained.

Fabrini backed away from the bulwark fencerail. “Shit,” he said, maybe afraid he’d get sucked off the deck and down into the churning blackness.

Cushing chuckled. “Yeah, I figure the Bahamas and Cuba are southwest of us right now.”

“Cuba?” Menhaus said, lighting a cigarette from the butt of his last. “I’ll be gone to hell.” Cushing gripped the rail as tight or tighter than the other men. When he was twelve his older brother, as a gag, had thrown him off a bridge into the drink. The drop had been only twelve feet at most. No harm done; he swam to shore unscathed. But ever since then, railings of any type made him nervous.

“Hey! You guys!” Gosling, the first mate, snapped as he passed. “You watch yourselves out there for chrissake. We get a good swell and you’ll be knocked ass over teakettle into the drink.”

They ignored him like experienced mariners. They’d been through the initiation, they figured, the sickness and all, they knew what they were doing. They were old hands now.

“Don’t worry about us,” Menhaus laughed.

He always laughed. “Yeah, don’t sweat it,” Fabrini said.

“Yeah, sure,” Gosling said. “And I’ll be the one who’ll have to fish your asses out before the sharks get ya.”

They laughed this off and Gosling went on his way, grumbling.

“You suppose there are sharks out there?” Menhaus wondered.

“No, he’s full of shit.”

“There’s sharks out there,” Cushing said. “We’re out in the ocean, aren’t we? They’re probably all over the place.”

“Fuck that,” Fabrini said. “Fuck that noise.”

“I read this book once.” Menhaus began.

“You read?” Fabrini snorted. “No shit?”

Menhaus laughed briefly. “No, I read this book about a shipwreck. And this guy was hounded by sharks the whole way.”

Nobody wanted to talk about that. None of them had ever been to sea before, save Saks, and the topic that kept coming up was the ship sinking. It was a subject that had been discussed to death the week before they left. And in each man’s mind, it was still there, a black sore festering.

“You ever hear about the guy with the little head?” Menhaus asked, grinning once again. “This guy gets shipwrecked and washes up on this island. He finds a bottle and opens it and out pops this genie. Blonde, beautiful. Just like that broad in that genie show. She says, ‘I’ll grant you any wish, master’. So the guy says, ‘I haven’t been with a woman in two months. You’re very beautiful. I’d like to make love to you’. The genie shakes her head, ‘That is forbidden, master’. Then the guy says, ‘Well, how about a little head?’”

Fabrini burst out laughing, slapping Cushing on the back several times. Cushing laughed, too, but gripped the rail a little tighter, afraid maybe that Fabrini’s good cheer was going to knock him over.

A gust of salty wind tore into them, making their jackets flap and rustle like flags on a high pole. Menhaus and Fabrini hugged themselves against the chill, but Cushing preferred to hang on. Tight. He was a big reader. He’d read books on just about everything. When he was younger, he’d been fascinated by the sea. He’d devoured books on marine life, naval battles, even the folklore of the sea. But, he realized right then, he’d never read anything about surviving a shipwreck. The idea of that bothered him.

“How about the one about that guy’s brother?” Menhaus went on, now that he had a captive audience. “He gets thrown off the same boat, but washes up on a different island. He finds the bottle, rubs it, out pops this genie. She gives him the same shit about granting his wishes. So he says, ‘I’d like my cock to be so long it drags on the ground’. So the genie makes his legs two inches long.”

They all laughed again and another gust came up. Perfectly punctuating the punch line this time. It occurred to Cushing that it was like the sea was laughing along with them … or at them. The wind hammered out of the north, yanking at their coats, making the legs of their pants flutter. The tarps on the lifeboats up on the boat deck snapped and strained at their moorings.

Fabrini said, “Let’s go in. Let the swabbies deal with this.”

The wind cranked up again, this time tearing the baseball cap from Fabrini’s head and sending it out over the water.

“Shit,” he said. “My lucky hat.”

Menhaus in tow, they left, leaving Cushing alone out by the rail. Cushing wasn’t even aware that they were gone. He watched Fabrini’s cap (it said CAT above the brim) get tossed about by the conflicting, angry winds. It came to rest on a wave, was inundated by the crest of another. Still it floated, drenched, bobbing, carried by ripples of foam. Something silvery came out of the deep and nudged it.

But by then, it was out of range.

George Ryan was feeling more himself by the time darkness fell over the ocean. There was no twilight. No moment where day and night stood balanced in some beautiful neutrality. One moment the dying arcs of the sun were glinting off the spray-beaded pane of the porthole, the shadows growing long like teeth, and the next, it was dark. More so, black. So black he couldn’t even see his hand in front of his face. The only light there was spilled in from the porthole, from the dimly-lit decks. Beyond the railing, it was utter blackness. Like a mineshaft at midnight.

Darkness.

Complete.

Unrelenting.

George rubbed his eyes and lit a cigarette. According to Morse, the captain, and good old Saks, they would be docking in Cayenne, French Guiana late the next evening. Saks said they could spend the night out on the town. But come first light, they had a job to do and they were damned well going to do it. George thought he’d probably pass on a night of drink and debauchery and just rest up in his hotel room on dry land. The other could wait until the job was done. He started thinking that two days at sea wasn’t bad. Not when you thought of the days when people spent months, years even, on a voyage.

“I could’ve stayed home,” he said under his breath.

And part of him still wished that he had.

But that part of him didn’t worry about creditors. It didn’t have the banks biting at its ass. It didn’t have two ex-wives salivating for alimony. It didn’t have a son to raise. It didn’t have a big, fat, juicy mortgage to worry about. It didn’t have monstrous dental bills from the kid’s braces. And it surely didn’t have to wade hip-deep through medical bills from the wife’s back surgery. No, that part of him didn’t give a shit in a high wind about any of that.

All it had was paranoia.

All it had was that tinny, metallic voice that kept echoing in George’s skull about how all of this was one colossal fuck-up. How this was one big mistake and he should’ve listened and now it was just too goddamn late, buddy.

George took drags off his cigarette, licking his dry lips.

Saks had organized the job. He’d recruited the crew which included George. The set-up was simple: west of someplace called Kaw just off the Kounana River, there was a diamond mine on the Guiana Shield that had been hacked from the jungle. It was owned in partnership by a French mining company and Franklin Fisk. The same Fisk of Fisk Technologies, the electronics magnate out of Miami, who’d made a killing with lithium batteries. The problem was this mining camp had no airstrip. Supplies had to be brought in by truck which took several days and the product had to go out the same way. During the rainy season, many of the roads were washed out, and in some cases, washed completely away. It cost money to keep rebuilding them not to mention the money lost while trucks idled away for days waiting for a decent, passable road. So Fisk wanted an airstrip. It would save the collective millions every year. Fly in what you need, fly out the product. What took trucks days to manage on hazardous jungle roads, planes did in a few hours.

It made sense.

Saks was a construction jobber out of Miami. He was the lowest bidder. He got the job, set everything up. Fisk’s people would have flatbed trailers waiting for them in Cayenne to off-load the heavy equipment onto. They would also have all the labor needed and all the materials waiting at the camp. Saks had already been there a few times and surveyed it all out. When the crew arrived, they would cut a strip into the jungle and each get fifteen grand a piece. Saks, of course, got a bigger cut. They all got paid well for a month’s work and Saks said they could wrap it up in three weeks tops. The local labor, mostly Maroons and Amerindians, didn’t fare so well — they worked for practically pennies a day.

George had already spent his money.

The fifteen grand — cash, no taxes — would pay off the dentist and take a good bite out of the medical bills. Lisa hadn’t wanted him to go. She didn’t like the idea of him cruising over the open sea in a ship loaded with big dozers and barrels of diesel fuel. But the money had changed her mind. Jacob, his boy, thought it was great. It was like an adventure to him. He wanted to come along. And wasn’t that just like a boy? Bring me something home, dad, he’d told George. You know, like a big snake or a shrunken head.

“Be careful of those big crocodiles,” Lisa had said before he left. “I saw it on TV. They eat people down there.”

Yeah, George thought, and so do the ones in the New York sewers.

George had never been in a real jungle before. He’d worked bridges and cut roads in the Louisiana bayou and Florida everglades. But, according to Saks, those places were about as tropical as Boise compared to the real, primeval green hell of French Guiana. This was a land of spiders bigger than your hand, poisonous insects, toxic plants, and venomous snakes. A lush, dripping, steaming green world where cholera and dengue fever, malaria and typhoid went unchecked. You had to be careful, Saks told them, because in the jungle things happen. Bot flies would lay their eggs in any open cut. Huge ticks would suck your blood. Parasitic worms would get under your skin. And biting sand flies would infect you with tropical ulcers that would eat holes right through you … yeah, it was all part of the allure and mystery of central French Guiana.

George finished his cigarette, slapped on his boots and slicker and went out onto deck. The wind had died down. And even though the ship was listing, it wasn’t as bad as earlier. He was almost starting to get used to its motion. The only thing that bothered him was the dark. It was black out there. Living in towns and cities, you tended to forget just what night really was after a time. That night meant
night.
It meant blackness, it meant absence of light, it meant forget about your eyes because they weren’t worth a damn out on a starless, moonless night on the ocean.

Yeah, George felt easier with the roll of the ship, but he didn’t dare go by the railing for fear of the pit of watery blackness beyond. It felt oddly and eerily to him like some huge mass grave that could never be filled.

And as he moved along the cabins, it fell over him again: the bad feeling. The gnawing, unpleasant sense that all was not right with this ship. Just a feeling. Yet, it gripped him like ice.

It’s just the dark, he told himself, the sea. That’s all.

And maybe that’s all it was, but he didn’t like it any better.

The ship bothered him.

He couldn’t quite put a finger on why, but it did. Morse, the captain, seemed able. As did the mates and crew. Some of them were drinkers, he knew, smelling of whiskey and gin. But not drunks. Not so far as he saw. Just men who had to work in the elements and needed a nip or two to keep them warm. Nothing wrong with that.