Dead Sea

by Tim Curran

  “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.

  6

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

  Something wasn’t right.

  He stood outside the pilothouse door, staring across the decks. They were lit and he could see everything. Nothing looked amiss… yet, yet something was not kosher. He could feel it deep down inside. Call it instinct, call it intuition, call it whatever you wanted, but something was really wrong here. He just couldn’t put a finger on what it was. He could feel the steady throb of the engines through the deck plates beneath his feet. It was not mechanical. After years spent on freighters, he could actually sense when there was a mechanical failure somewhere just as a man can sense something not quite right with his own body. It was like a sixth sense you developed when you knew the sea and you knew your vessel and how she felt and responded and reacted to every wake and swell.

  No, the ship was fine.

  The crew was fine.

  What then?

  He stood there, smoking, sending feelers out in every direction.

  It didn’t make any sense. Yet, he’d been sailing long enough to know he could trust his instincts. But this seemed almost beyond experience, beyond comprehension, something intangible and unknown.. . an almost physical menace.

  There was trouble.

  There was danger… but where? How?

  Gosling’s skin had gone clammy and his hands were trembling. It was bad and he had no explanation. He threaded his way amongst the cargo lashed to the spar deck and went to the railing. The sea was calm. Like glass. Like the water in some kid’s little backyard swimming pool. That wasn’t right. He’d been sailing the Atlantic for years and he’d never seen the waters so inexplicably calm. Especially this far out in open water. And March was a notoriously bad time in this part of the ocean. Storms came and went like notions. But never, never, was the sea so positively… dead.

  Okay, he thought, okay. Let’s see what’s happening here.

  He walked into the pilothouse, secured the hatch, stood there with his hands on his hips.

  “How goes it?” Gosling said.

  Iverson, the wheelsman, was seated at the chart table, banks of computer screens glowing before him. A copy of Hustler was balanced on his knee. He shrugged. “Good to go, Mr. Gosling. Pretty quiet out the
re tonight.”

  Gosling nodded, sighed, just couldn’t get that certainty out of his system that something was terribly wrong or about to go south on them. It was on him, in him, an almost physical sense of expectation, of dread.

  The pilothouse was rectangular in shape, looked much like an air traffic control tower from the interior, windows to all sides. It was a handsome room, decked out in oak and brass, all original construction from the ‘50s. The original ship’s wheel was still in place, next to the binnacle and gyrocompass repeater which was connected to the gyro down in dunnage. Of course, nobody manned the wheel anymore. The Mara Corday was navigated exclusively by DGPS, Digital Global Positioning System, which was monitored by computer and fed to autopilot. To get to point B from point A, it was only a matter of entering preset coordinates. Gosling checked the screens, was only marginally reassured. Across the front of the pilothouse were panels of controls and instrumentation – radar units, bow thruster controls, RDF and Navtex receivers.

  “You get the weather?”

  “Yeah, about twenty minutes ago. NWS calls for clear skies through tomorrow night.”

  Gosling checked the satellite imagery on one of the computer screens where the ship was fed continuous atmospheric info. He read through the forecast on the weather fax receiver. Yeah, like Iverson said, there was nothing of concern there. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Still, Gosling wasn’t satisfied. The ship had two Kelvin radar units and Inmarsat B and C Satnav, Electronic Chart System. Everything checked. They were on course. What the hell was it then? The more he couldn’t find the glitch here, the ghost in the machine, the more it ate at him.

  “Calm tonight, eh?” Iverson said, flipping through pages.

  Calm before the storm, Gosling thought morosely.

  Iverson set his magazine down. Looked nervous and picked it up again. “You ever seen a calm like this, Mister Gosling?”

  Gosling ignored him. He checked the communication systems. The ship had standard radiotelephone, VHF, SSB, MF/HF stations. It had voice, data, fax, and telex connectivity via Inmarsat Satcom. Gosling scanned all the channels. Everything. Commercial, marine, aviation, even the distress frequencies. There was nothing but static and a shrill white noise he’d never heard before.

  “You had activity before?” he said.

  Iverson nodded. “Shit, yeah. I had chatter all over the place.”

  “Nothing now.”

  “Gotta be.”

  Iverson scanned the channels himself. He checked the components over. Everything looked good. “I don’t get it.”

  But Gosling was beginning to. Because whatever was coming, he figured, it was coming now, swooping down on them out of the night. It was crazy thinking, still it persisted. His guts were roiled like stormy waters, his throat tight, his scalp itchy.

  “You all right, Mister Gosling?”

  Gosling looked at him hard and for the first time in his life, he couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Nothing that would make sense anyway.

  Satnav was still operational. Radar was blank… oddly blank, not so much as a cloud out there. They were still online, operational. But audio and radar were down or seemed to be… now why was that?

  Lights out, Gosling found himself thinking. The lights are being turned out on us one at a time. Lights out.

  He was imagining a tall building at night, all the windows lit.. . then, one by one, the lights going out. Lights Out. That was also the name of an old spooky radio show. And what did the announcer say at the beginning while that distant bell was gonging? It… is.. . later… than… you… think…

  Iverson kept scanning channels. “Something funny here,” he said.

  And, yeah, it was funny, all right. Gosling was thinking it was funny, too. Because something was building here, something was happening incrementally and he didn’t honestly know what it was. Only that he could feel it gathering momentum. Like some negative electrical charge in the air gaining impetus.

  There was a shrill beeping.

  Iverson said, “GPS says we’re off-line… interference or something…”

  There was a hint of panic to his voice and Gosling knew it wasn’t just his imagination now: Iverson was feeling it, too. Maybe one system would go to hell, but all of them? One after the other?

  Together, they walked over to the binnacle. The magnetic compass was spinning around in circles. The gyrocompass was rolling, trying to find a bearing.

  “Jesus,” Iverson said.

  7

  “You see?” Fabrini said when Menhaus and he were in their cabin with Cook snoring away. “I knew there was a catch to this shit. I just fucking knew it. Didn’t I tell you that night that there had to be a catch?”

  Menhaus nodded. With sleepy eyes, he studied the clouds of smoke he was exhaling. “You did indeed. You surely did.”

  “And I was right, goddammit. Fifteen-thousand for what? Three weeks’ work? Yeah, that’s what he said. He left out the crap about poisonous snakes and leeches and man-eating alligators.”

  “Crocodiles. Caimans. Cushing said-”

  “Who gives a damn what you call ‘em. They eat your ass all the same.”

  Menhaus chewed his lower lip, stroked his mustache. “Saks said it wouldn’t be like that where we’re going.”

  “I don’t care what he said.”

  “But we’re not working on a bridge. We’re not even by water, he said. Not too close, anyway.”

  Fabrini’s dark skin went red. “Listen to yourself, would ya? For chrissake, you dumb shit, he’ll say anything. Didn’t you notice how he didn’t mention any of this shit until we were in the middle of the Bumfuck Sea? If he’d said it before we sailed, nobody in their right mind would’ve went.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Damn straight I’m right” He pulled off his shoes and threw them against the bulkhead. A few flakes of gray paint chipped free. “Sometimes, man, I wish I was still in stir”

  Menhaus said nothing. He was thinking about Talia, his wife. She’d never bore him any children. Had a vicious tongue and an ass the size of a bus. He was thinking about that ass, thinking how he’d miss it if anything went wrong. Right now he wanted more than anything to hear her call him a lazy good-for-nothing slob. The idea of it made him want to cry.

  “Starting right now, buddy,” Fabrini said, “you and me watch each other’s backs. Fuck the rest of ‘em. We’re coming out of this alive. And when we get back to New Orleans, we’re going to get us a couple hookers and get drunk for three pissing days. We’ll get some nice young ones, hear? Tight asses.”

  Fabrini turned the light off and stared into the darkness.

  Menhaus was thinking he didn’t give a damn about tight asses. He wanted Talia’s ass and her mouth and all the shit combined which made a life. It was all he saw now. All he wanted to see.

  They laid there silently for a time, listening to Cook snore.

  Fabrini got back up, went to the porthole. He couldn’t see a thing out there. He paced back and forth, then sat back down again. “Dammit,” he said.

  “What’s eating you?” Menhaus asked him.

  Fabrini was breathing hard in the darkness. “I don’t know… I gotta funny feeling or something. I got the chills here.”

  Menhaus did, too. “Me, too. I feel like I got the willies something awful,” he admitted.

  And whatever it was, it was growing, filling the air, inundating the ship and drowning the men one by one.

  After a time, Menhaus nervously said, “Hey, Fabrini? You hear the one about the gay rabbi who wanted a sex change?”

  8

  In the pilothouse, Iverson had forgotten about his Hustler. Forgotten about tits and ass and everything in-between. He’d been feeling groggy when Gosling came in, knowing he was pulling the dogwatch and thinking how far away morning was, sucking down a lot of coffee.

  But now he was wide awake and it had nothing to do with caffeine.

  Radio was out. Satnav and Satco
m off-line. Compass fucked-up. Iverson was a modern sailor. He trusted his instruments, had complete faith in them. And when they were out, it was back to celestial observation and dead reckoning, paper charts and sextants. Back to the jungle. Just like in the old days when a ship at sea might as well have been on another planet. Alone, completely alone.

  Iverson sipped his coffee and swallowed.

  What he was watching was the radar. The screen had been empty for the past hour, but now it had locked onto something. Something big, something spreading out for miles and miles it seemed. Something like a bank of fog that was like no bank of fog Iverson had ever seen. Even the radar’s computer was having trouble telling exactly what it was. It was not solid, certainly, it was a gaseous envelope like a patch of mist… yet much denser. And the Mara Corday was steaming right into it.

  Twice now, Iverson had made to call up the old man, but had hesitated. What could he say? A bank of fog? Jesus H. Christ, Iverson, you called me up here to look at a bank of fog? No, he couldn’t call the captain in on this. Besides, Gosling had the deck and you didn’t want to be going over his head. Gosling wasn’t the sort you wanted to piss off. Gosling saw the fog coming. He’d seen it first and it was he who told Iverson that, the way it was expanding and the rate it was moving at – an unprecedented sixty-knots, if radar was reading it right – there was no way they could get around it. Whatever it was, it had them. Had them tight, by Jesus.

  “Besides, for chrissake,” Gosling had said. “What the hell am I going to tell the skipper? We steamed twenty miles off course to avoid some fucking mist?”

  Sure, that made sense.

  But it didn’t make Iverson feel any better. Because it was almost on them now and he could see it filling the screen, opening up to swallow them like the jaws of some immense beast.

  Iverson began to pray under his breath.

  9

  George Ryan and Cushing were forward, up near the bow watching the ship cut into the flat, glassy waters.