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.
2
“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.
3
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
