Dead Sea (3 page)

Maybe it was the cargo.

The way it was stowed. The decks were obstructed, crowded really, with the heavy equipment they needed to clear a strip in the jungle. Two big Cat dozers. A pair of shiny yellow John Deere graders. Scrapers. Front-end loaders. A roller. Anywhere you went on deck you had to weave your way amongst them. Huge crates containing iron concrete forms, picks and shovels, form spikes, strike boards. Spare parts for the machinery.

Just too much clutter, too much confusion.

Then, George supposed, that was probably the way things were done. Every available space on a cargo freighter meant money and you had to pack it in any way you could. Just like in the back of a truck.

The more he thought about it, the more he wondered if it really was the ship that was bothering him. Maybe it was something else. Something waiting out there … on the sea or in the jungle. Regardless, it was down deep in his belly like tacks.

George went aft to join the others. The night seemed even darker.

The
Mara Corday
was a 720-foot container ship driven by a single-screw, 32,000 horsepower steam turbine. She had a 38,700 ton displacement and could do twenty-two knots fully trimmed. She had seven holds and a special dangerous cargo area in the fore hold. Though her keel was laid back in the early 1950s, she had been extensively retrofitted with advanced computer and navigational systems and could be crewed by twenty-one men.

George Ryan was mistaken in thinking there was something wrong with the ship. She held fine in heavy seas and whispered over calm ones. Not a sailor on board felt what he was feeling. They could feel the
Mara Corday
under them and she was solid, tight. If there was trouble ahead, then it wouldn’t be from the ship.

By seven that night, the wind picked-up to thirty knots and the ship moved with an uneasy, yawing leeward roll that was not surprising considering her load. The decks were full and the holds below packed tight with everything from drums of ready-mix concrete to bins of asphalt for Saks and his crew, rebuilt diesel engines and mining drills and pallets of steel girders, assorted other stores needed in Cayenne.

The
Mara Corday
held her own and could have held it through a hurricane. She was high and proud and tireless, a real workhorse of the seas. She could have plied her trade for decades to come and probably would, unless something interfered with her.

And right then, something was about to.

They ate their supper that night in shifts.

First, the captain, his mates, and the chief engineer. Then the ship’s crew down in the messroom in groups of four. Finally, Saks and his men. They chose to be last to give their stomachs a little more time to orient themselves to shipboard life. The fare was good. A thick beef stew with biscuits and French bread. Plenty of fruit. Ham sandwiches with the meat cut like slabs. Apple pie and ice cream for dessert. Life at sea didn’t agree with any of Saks’s men, but the eats were right up their alley.

“Hey, Fabrini,” Menhaus said through a mouth of bread, “how do you castrate a hillbilly?”

“Kick his sister in the jaw.”

There were a few laughs around the table at that, but not many. In the past two weeks since Saks had organized his crew, the men had spent much time together and Menhaus and Fabrini wore on the nerves after awhile.

“Where’s the hardtack and gruel?” George said as he sat down and poured himself a glass of water.

Saks wiped gravy off his lips. “Well, I’ll be goddamned,” he said. “Isn’t that George Ryan? The tough Irish sonofabitch who doesn’t get seasick like the rest of you babies?”

“Fuck you,” George said.

All the others — Saks, Fabrini, Menhaus, Cushing, Soltz, and Cook — were digging right in. Their stomachs had adjusted and they found that ship life made them ravenous. The wind, the weather, the sea. It made men hungry. George hadn’t been too sure he’d be able to eat a bite on his way over … but now, seeing all that food. He dug in.

“Hey, shit-fer-brains,” Saks snapped at Cook, “dish our George up some stew, will ya? He’s the last of the hard men.”

Fabrini giggled. “Yeah, he’s about as hard as Soltz’s cock.”

Menhaus thought that was hilarious. His belly jiggled and he slapped Soltz on the shoulder. Soltz spewed out a carrot. “Please,” he said, “I’m trying to eat here.”

Soltz was something of a quandary to the other men. Balding and bespectacled, he was pale as snow and soft as baby fat. Not the sort of guy you pictured on a scraper or a roller. His belly was so large it looked like he’d swallowed a beach ball. But it wasn’t hard fat like Saks had at his belt or girth like Menhaus wore proudly, it was soft fat. With his brooding hangdog-face and allergies and full pink lips (which he applied Chapstik to habitually), he looked very much like the much-put upon, last-one-to-be-picked-for-every-game sort of kid he had once been.

He just didn’t fit in.

“Yeah, leave mama’s boy alone over there,” Fabrini said.

“Saks? Do I have to put up with this?” Soltz wanted to know.

“Yeah, big bad men like us,” Menhaus chided.

“That’s enough,” Saks said. “Leave him be, you faggots.”

George felt sorry for the man. With a crew like this you had to be able to speak up for yourself, to trade insult for insult without getting your feathers ruffled. “Just tell ‘em to kiss your ass, Soltz,” he said.

Cook slid him a plate of stew. He was an emaciated guy with fine features and almost downy blond hair. He rarely spoke and when he did, most of the others with their blue collar sensibilities did not understand what he was talking about. But none of it bothered Cook, he took his share of shit and seemed to be perpetually amused by the high school mentality of the others. He never smiled nor frowned. He just accepted and went on.

“Eat up, tough guy,” Saks said.

Fabrini grinned. “If you’re still hungry, I got something for you to eat.”

“I’d starve on that,” George said and everybody laughed. Even a slight smile crossed Cook’s dour lips.

Saks finished up, pushed his plate away and burped. “There’s a kiss for you, Fabrini.” He lit up a cigar. “You boys eat good, rest up. When we hit the jungle you’ll be working sunup to sundown or I’ll throw your asses to the crocs.”

A few more insults passed in Saks’s direction. He laughed along with the rest of them. Sometimes the others never knew what to make of him. They weren’t sure if he was all hot air or the real thing. He was a short stocky guy built like a slab of cement. His arms bulged with muscles and tattoos, his chest was a drum. His face was perpetually sunburned and leathery, his powder blue eyes bulging like egg yolks. A year shy of fifty-five, he kept his thinning hair and bristle brush mustache dyed jet black. He’d pulled two tours with the Navy Seabees in Vietnam, clearing beaches and laying down airstrips under heavy fire. He started up his own contracting firm not long after. He’d worked all over Central and South America doing everything from chopping roads through the bush to rigging camps and laying railheads.

George decided Saks had asshole written all over him. He suspected that the moment he met the man and knew it for sure when they’d all gone out drinking two days before they sailed and Saks had done nothing but brag about his exploits and intimidate the others. The final straw had been when he started doing one-armed push-ups on the barroom floor.

Gradually, the talk turned away from general insults and the sexual habits of the crew’s mothers and onto French Guiana in general. Saks had a few things to say on the subject. He told them about the notorious penal colonies the French government had run there, the most celebrated being Devil’s Island. How escaped prisoners would swim from there, most either drowning or getting devoured by sharks. The few survivors that made shore would have to hack their way through hundreds of miles of primordial jungle to the Maroni River, which separated French Guiana from Dutch Guiana, now Surinam. And crossing that dirty, brown river was no easy bit.

“Infested with piranhas,” Saks said. “Dutch soldiers stationed on the river would watch convicts get boiled down to skeletons right before their eyes.”

“Remind me to stay dry,” George murmured.

“You ever been out where we’re going?” Menhaus asked him.

Saks pulled off his cigar, studied the burning end. “Once. Ten years ago. We laid a bridge over the Mara River. That’s west of where we’re going.”

“How was it?” Fabrini asked.

“It was hell, that’s what it was. We were deep in the jungle. Swamps everywhere. Mosquitoes and flies laid on you like blankets. They laughed at the bug juice we’d brought along. After awhile, we were so bitten up we started spreading mud on our faces and arms like the local boys we’d hired. But that didn’t keep the leeches off you or the goddamn snakes.”

“Snakes?” Soltz gasped. “I don’t like snakes.”

“He don’t like long, hanging things,” Fabrini said. “Reminds him of what he don’t have.”

“I’m more sensitive to certain things than you are,” Soltz explained, to which Fabrini rolled his eyes.

Saks ignored them. “Third day out we lost a kid to snakebite. He was a local. He was cutting some wood in the jungle for struts. A bushmaster got him. A big bastard. Ten feet, maybe. Came out of a hole in the mud, sank its fangs in the kid’s ankle. We shot him up with antivenin. Didn’t matter. He was dead twenty minutes later.”

“Fuck this,” Fabrini said. “You didn’t say nothing about shit like that.”

The others looked as pale as Soltz, who had now gone one shade darker than fresh cream.

“You can always swim back,” George told Fabrini.

“There were water snakes on the river. Couple of guys got bit by them. Made ‘em sick, but it passed. We were real careful after the kid died. At least we thought so until Tommy Johansen bought it,” Saks said slowly and for the first time there seemed to be something akin to real emotion on his face.

“What happened?” Menhaus inquired. “Another snake?”

“Crocodile. I’ll never forget it.” Saks exhaled a cloud of smoke. The only sounds were the wind outside, the waves crashing into the bow, and the hum of the turbines below. “I’ve seen all kinds of shit in my life. We had a pet snake in ‘Nam. A fifteen-foot python. Gentle as a baby. Used to keep the rats out of camp. Then it helped itself to some hooker’s baby she’d left alone so she could suck some dick. I seen a VC get taken down by a tiger over there. We just watched that sucker get shredded and we cheered when it dragged the little zipperhead off into the jungle. That tiger was on our side. I saw a guy get slashed by a Jaguar in Paraguay. It blinded him. I saw a guy’s pet pit bull fall into the Amazon and get turned into hamburger by piranhas. I even once saw some Mex get stung to death by bees in Bolivia. But I hadn’t seen nothing until Tommy Johansen bought it.

“Tommy and me were close. We built docks in Rio and Salvador for years. We were tight. One day, on that goddamn bridge job, one of the locals let a float drift away downriver. Tommy went nuts. Made the guy wade down there after it, Tommy leading him by the ear. I saw what happened next. Croc must’ve been a twenty-footer, maybe twenty-five. Bigger around than a goddamn refrigerator. Vicious bastard. Teeth like railroad spikes. It came up out of the water, that filthy shit-brown water, out of the weeds …” Saks had to stop here a moment, his voice was beginning to waver. His eyes were moist. He breathed in and out very slowly. “Rotten fucking lizard grabbed Tommy around the waist and we all saw it. We heard his bones shatter like twigs. Blood everywhere. Tommy was screaming and screaming. The locals were screaming. I think I was screaming, too.” He licked his lips. “Tommy was a big boy. Six-foot-five, three hundred pounds. All muscle. But to that fucking croc he was a ragdoll. He shook Tommy back and forth until there was no fight left in him. By the time we got down there, the croc had dragged Tommy downriver. I saw it drag him under. I saw one of Tommy’s arms flapping before it went under like he was saying goodbye.”

After a moment of silence, George said, “Did you find him?”

“No. Never found so much as his hat. The croc never came back.”

“I didn’t come down here to be eaten,” Menhaus pouted.

“Me either,” Fabrini said. “Fuck that.”

“A caiman,” Cushing said. “It was probably a caiman. A big one. A Black Caiman.”

“It doesn’t bring him back knowing it’s name,” Cook said.

Everyone looked up. It was the first time they’d heard him speak other than in response to a direct question. The logic of what he said shut everyone up.

“Yeah, caiman, all right. That’s what it was,” Saks finally said. “Where we’re going, maybe it won’t be that bad. Won’t be any crocs or fucking caimans around. Just watch for snakes. They’ll be spraying for bugs. You’ll be safe enough. Just be careful.”

“That’s why you’re telling us this stuff, isn’t it, Saks?” Cushing said. “So we’ll be careful.”

“Yes. The jungle is primitive, girls. Remember that. You’re not the boss there. It’s the boss. You’d better have respect for it, cause it sure as hell will have no respect for you.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Soltz said, pushing away from the table and bolting out the door. He left it wide open. The wind hammered it against the bulkhead.

The first mate, Gosling, appeared moments later. “You men secure these hatches when you come and go or I’ll throw you to the fucking fish.”

He slammed the hatch and disappeared.

Menhaus and Fabrini left next, both were bitching about the job, about life, about nature in general. Cook slipped out without a word. Only Cushing, George, and Saks were left.

“We should get some sleep,” Cushing suggested.

“Yeah,” George said, leaving his plate half-full. His appetite was gone again. He felt sick. “You coming, Saks?”

“No. I think I’ll stay and think about my friend awhile.”

Cushing and George waited, not knowing what to say.

Saks grimaced. “Well, what do you want? Get the fuck out of my sight.”

They left him alone.

Gosling, the first mate, licked his sandpaper lips and lit his pipe.