Tim Curran - Dead Sea

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.

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.