Dead in the Water

  “Yes, of course,” Donna said as the cat yowled and fought to get away. She dug her claws into Donna’s upper thighs, “Shit!” Donna shouted, and held her tight. To her right, Matt was scrabbling into his father’s lap. Poor darling. Poor baby. In a tiny boat on a stormy sea …

  Alone, alone, all, all alone

  Alone on a wide, wide sea

  “Will you help me watch the cat?” she asked him through clenched teeth. “She’s going to be a mommy and she needs a lot of care.”

  “She sleeps with me now,” Matt said. His fingers brushed hers as he petted the cat. “She knows me.”

  Donna managed a smile. “That’s good. Then you can let her know nothing bad is going to happen.” And get her to stop shredding Donna’s legs.

  Matt’s head moved. Donna bent down and kissed his cheek. His hand jerked. Then he stroked the cat, who calmed not in the least. Grimacing, Donna looked past him to John, who was clutching his stomach. Uh oh, seasick already.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any Maalox with the rations?” he asked Ramón. “There are rations? And water?”

  “Ahoy!” The voice of Captain Esposito boomed tinnily through the fog. “Are the passengers in their launch?”

  “Aye, sir, just about. We’re missing the chico, Kevin.”

  “We’re putting him on the next boat. Prepare to cast off.”

  “But, sir …” There was surprise in his voice.

  “Cast off, damn you! Put to sea!” The man’s voice rose shrilly. “Get them away!”

  Donna half rose, lifting the cat with her. “Kevin! Kevin!”

  “Sit down.” Ramón scrambled into the boat. “Everybody, sit down and stay down. We’re going.” He called, “We’re off, sir.”

  Loud bangs hammered the hull as they flew alongside it. Cries inside the Morris became shrieks and screams. A loud hiss: oh, Jesus, steam. Donna shut her eyes, trying not to imagine scalded men. Burning flesh.

  Drowning flesh.

  Beside her, John murmured, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, blessed art Thou among women.”

  A Catholic, she thought vaguely. And she thought he was Jewish.

  In her mind she saw drowning men, their eyes goggly like fish as they fought and clawed to get up the ladders and away from the water. Spinning slowly in their orbits, like a floating boy, like the wheel of fortune.

  The waves crashed against the hull of the lifeboat. Jesus, how far above the water were they? The passengers tensed like a bunch of rodeo cowboys leaping onto the backs of wild bulls.

  “Hold on!” Ramón said. He pressed something else and a loud pop filled the boat.

  The cat screamed and clawed Donna’s forearms. Donna clutched her hard, and the cat worked her furiously. Elise sat frozen with Phil’s arms around her. Ruth twisted in the boat, gripping on to the gunwale. Matt cowered against his father, and John’s voice rose—

  “Pray for us now, pray for us—”

  Donna conjured up a bizarre image of a Neptune Cowboy God, prodding the ocean’s flanks with his trident cattle prod, poke that baby, that monster, that sucker, that thrashing mother!—

  —and then they hit the water.

  They roller-coastered away from the Morris, mountain, valley, abyss, Mt. Everest. Matt screamed and screamed and screamed. The boat spun in a circle, around and around like a carnival ride. The cat guttered Donna’s arms as she rolled with the frenzy, gasping, “It’s okay, kitty. It’s okay, kitty. It’s okay.”

  A wall of black and gray, inky and poisonous, earthquaked around them. With a rush of panic, Donna realized that though the Morris was five hundred feet long, she couldn’t see the hull, or the superstructure, or the hundreds of containers that rattled and roared like caged beasts.

  Rub-a-dub-dub, they swirled around and around, shot up, down. They were drenched, screaming, praying. Irrationally, Donna focused all her attention on hanging on to the cat, who fought her every inch of the way. Up and down, roller-coaster city, up and down, almost too far down into the trenches of the waves. The stern dipped underwater, scooping up cold sea and brittle kelp and throwing them into the boat.

  Ruth screamed and said, “It’s in here with us!” Donna pursed her lips and held on more tightly to the cat.

  “It’s okay, kitty, okay, kitty, okay, you little fucker,” she said over and over. “Goddamn it, stop scratching me.”

  The lifeboat teetered on top of a wave like a surfer on a board. Donna held her breath as the others shrieked. If it tipped over, they’d topple out. When had she put on her life jacket? She didn’t remember doing it. A quick check showed that John’s was on, too.

  John was groaning like a wounded animal. He sounded like Nemo, in fact. Donna shouted, “Hey, you hurt?”

  “… fine. Just my ulcer,” he said between moans. She nodded as though it made sense. Hey, you okay? Yeah, I’m just swimming around in the middle of the ocean here, and I’ve got a little cramp. But it’s nothing serious. Can’t see land, and I’m running out of steam (oh, God, the steam on the Morris) but hey, don’t sweat it.

  The boat pitched and yawed as though taunting them. Then it shot down the front of the wave and splattered into the trench. Gushes of water rained down on the passengers. Elise and Phil were getting the brunt of it, but Elise hadn’t said a word. They were hidden from her; she prayed to God they were still in the boat (and not their sacrifice. Christ, she was sorry she’d joked like that. It sure as hell wasn’t funny now.).

  “Oh, please, oh, please,” Ruth murmured as the boat shimmied and shuddered. “Please, if I have to go, let it be here. Oh, Stephen.”

  “Ruth, honey, cool it,” Donna grunted, squeezing Nemo with one hand as she hung on with the other.

  “But he warned me. I felt it.”

  “Mmm.”

  Abruptly the waves flattened against the surface, slamming everyone against the floorboards and the gunwales. Nemo screeched and tried to free herself; Donna, clinging to her, was bumped off her seat and almost pitched over the side. Let go of the goddamned cat, she told herself, before it registered that the storm, or whatever it had been, was over.

  The fog billowed with sighs, groans, the tabby’s claws injecting Donna with cat-scratch fever.

  “Everyone okay?” Ramón’s flashlight snapped on. He scooted off his seat into the bottom of the boat and fumbled around for a few seconds. “Supplies are still secured,” he said. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Bullshit,” Elise snapped. Donna found it within herself—a total miracle—to guffaw. The broad was all right! “Oh, you shut up! I’m going to—”

  Donna couldn’t see her, but she felt a rush of air as Elise threw back her hand for a punch. A brief struggle, as Phil, perhaps, held her arm.

  “Sorry I hit you.” Donna made herself feel sincere.

  “You’re going to be sorrier!”

  “Listen,” Ruth cut in. “Listen!”

  No one moved as all obeyed the urgency in her voice.

  No foghorns. No alarm sirens.

  Ramón shouted, “Ahoy!”

  Nothing.

  After a few seconds, Ramón crossed himself.

  Donna’s mouth dropped open. “We can’t have moved very far away from it. Not yet.”

  “Oh, my Lord,” Ruth whispered. “It can’t have gone down.”

  John half rose. “There might be men in the water. We should search for—”

  “Sit the fuck down!” Ramón bellowed. “It didn’t go down. Don’t be an asshole. We would have felt the suction. We … we would have known.”

  No one said anything. Donna knew, however, that she wouldn’t have known. Not while they were riding the beast … and why had it stopped? Was that from the Morris going under?

  Jesus. Jesus. Tears welled in her eyes. Jesus. That couldn’t have happened. It just couldn’t. Maybe all of this was a nightmare. Maybe she was back in Tahoe, and the kid hadn’t died, either. She’d had a cold; this could be a fever dream. The John beside her was a doctor; maybe she’d included him in
this sick fantasy because a real Dr. John hovered over her sickbed at a Tahoe infirmary. The hospital visit compliments of Daniel, her Caesar’s pickup, who was a nice guy after all, happily ever after.

  “If it hasn’t gone down, why can’t we hear it?” Phil said. “We can’t be more than fifty feet away from it, if that.”

  “It’s okay, hombre.” Ramón spoke through clenched teeth. Lowering himself off the bench, he duckwalked toward the stern. Donna scooted herself and the cat aside. Ramón sat next to her.

  “We’re in the shipping lanes. Another freighter will come by and pick us up soon.”

  No one spoke. Donna scrutinized the wall of fog for a big, black shadow, a hulk of gray, anything.

  “She didn’t go down. We’d be able to tell,” Ramón insisted.

  “How?” John shouted at him.

  “What do you want me to do?” Ramón draped his hands between his knees. “What can I do?”

  “Turn back,” John said.

  For a moment the fog blustered in a swirl, and Donna clearly saw the disbelief on Ramón’s face. Also the despair. She understood: there was no way for them to turn back, even if they knew which direction they were moving in.

  Matt sniffled. “Hey.” Ramón reached across Donna and John with a hand toward him. Matt flinched inside the protective cocoon his father had made of his own body. “Hey, we gonna be okay. Would I let anything happen to a cool dude like you? This is like how the Vikings sailed. Remember I told you about them?”

  “The Morris caused this fog,” Elise said with certainty. “You were carrying something you weren’t supposed to. I know all about it.”

  There was silence. Donna’s lips parted and she turned toward Ramón, whom the fog had once again concealed. She heard him sigh deeply.

  “What’s this?” Donna demanded.

  “The cargo. There was some kind of toxic waste in the cargo,” Elise said.

  Another silence. Then Ramón finally spoke. “It wouldn’t have caused this.”

  Donna grabbed his arm. “What? What wouldn’t have caused this?”

  “Nothing—”

  “Don’t try to bullshit me,” she said harshly, digging her nails into his biceps.

  “Ay,” Ramón protested. “It was just some stuff.” Gasped as Donna dug deeper.

  A sigh. “Who told you?” Ramón asked Elise.

  A beat, then: “Cha-cha. Just before we left the ship. He was laughing. He was—”

  “Cha-cha?” Phil laughed nervously. “Cha-cha told you there was something toxic aboard? That’s just ridiculous, honey.”

  “But they did, you idiot. You never listen. He just admitted it. Didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

  “We had something … that wasn’t on the manifest.” Ramón paused, and there was confusion in his voice. “But Cha-cha didn’t know about it.”

  “Holy shit.” Donna gripped tighter. “Goddamn it, what the fuck was it?”

  “Some … some stuff in barrels.” The fog thinned again, to reveal Ramón’s deep-set Latin eyes, studying Donna’s shoulder bag. Oh, God, was he thinking about her gun?

  She pulled the bag tight against her body and glared at him. “Go on.”

  He ran his fingers along his thigh. “I told you. It was nothing.”

  She put her hand in the bag. The others were staring at the two of them. Nemo mewed. Somewhere above them, something made a noise that could have been the shriek of a bird. Beneath them, something bumped into the boat, once, twice, stopped. Elise cried out and moved to a different part of the bench.

  Donna glared at Ramón. He smiled weakly at her. “It wasn’t nothing, okay?” His accent was thick now, pure East Los Angeles. She stiffened her jaw and put her hand around the revolver. There was no safety on it, of course. .38 Specials don’t have safeties.

  She had only shot one man in her entire life, and once was enough. But Ramón didn’t need to know that.

  “You’d better find some way to tell me we weren’t set up,” she gritted. “Because what I’m afraid of, what I’m worried about, Mr. Ramón, is that you guys had something you weren’t supposed to, and the plan was to dump it in the ocean and scuttle the Morris.”

  “No!” he cried.

  “Oh, my God,” Ruth said in an underbreath.

  “No, it wasn’t nothing like that. It wasn’t nothing that bad. We had some guys in Hawaii.” He hunched his shoulders, started to raise his hand, glanced down at the purse, and shook his head. “Cha-cha didn’t know.”

  “Yes, he did,” Elise cut in. She was livid. “He most certainly did.”

  “Tell me what it was,” Donna said.

  Ramón shrugged. “I don’t know. Honest. It was from a company that works for the military.” Sweat trickled from his temple and slid down the side of his chin. “They couldn’t get a permit.”

  “You bastards!” Elise lunged at Ramón, startling the cat off Donna’s lap. It darted beneath the beach, meowing. Matt started to cry again. Ruth screamed and cried, “Please, please!”

  In a blind instant of fury, Donna began to raise her hand out of her purse, stopped herself. Thank God it wasn’t loaded. Thank God.

  Ramón raised his hands as if she had drawn on him. “You know what a death ship is?” Donna hissed at him. “They make it look like an accident to collect the insurance, don’t they?”

  “We didn’t do that!” he shouted, looking at the others, for backing, for mercy.

  “Is that what Cha-cha told you?” Ramón asked Elise. His voice shook hard. He didn’t lower his hands. He’d been arrested before, Donna realized. He wasn’t as sleek and suave as he acted.

  “Cha-cha,” Donna cut in. “How convenient to have a first-class nutcase aboard. Guy who always talks about sinking the boat. Does he have a deal with you? You guarantee him a cut? A room with a view? What?”

  “He didn’t know. I swear he didn’t.” Lowering his hands, he held them out beseechingly, gaze darting around the boat, making eye contact with each person. “He always talked like that. We weren’t …” He quieted. “You’ll never believe me.”

  Donna licked her lips. Someone was crying. “That doesn’t matter anyway. We can assume it’s been dumped. You did your job.”

  And the thirsty ocean had swallowed whatever the Morris had provided for it.

  And what else have we given it, John thought as they drifted, through the years and the centuries? Tons and tons of spoiling food, sewage, half-degraded biodegradables. Embalming fluid. Hypodermic needles dripping with experimental serums; Petri dishes wild with recombinant DNA; nerve gas …

  Nuclear waste. All carefully cataloged, responsibly contained, legally and safely disposed of.

  He knew of many things they should not pour into the ocean. In his quest for a cure, he had created some of them.

  God, what a world.

  What an ocean. No matter it was angry with them. He thought of another line from the Coleridge poem about the Ancient Mariner: The very deep did rot. Ah, yes, with the stink and contamination of the human race, imposing itself upon nature in the classic Western way: subdue the earth. Subdue it.

  Ruin it.

  He took a breath to clear his head; he couldn’t allow himself the luxury of poetic despair. His child was in danger.

  But maybe the waste had caused the fog. He remembered how it had run over the ship, clung to it for days. And now that they had moved away from the Morris (or so one had to assume, or at least pray, was true) the fog had thinned considerably. Oh, it was still with them, and at times it thickened and hid them from each other, but by and large it remained in the bottom of the boat and spilled over the side. Most of the time, they all could see each other, for which he was profoundly grateful. He thought he would go crazy if he couldn’t see their faces.

  The water began to churn again. Up and down, way up, sliding into the chute of water. Waves shaped like orange slices scratched at the boat and Matt burrowed into him like a monkey, hanging around his neck, their life jackets separating them like two
pop beads. John gripped him so hard he feared he would crack Matty’s bones.

  “Daddy,” Matty whispered. “Daddy, please.”

  “It’s okay, baby. We’ve got our life jackets on and we’re in a boat that’s sending out a secret code like an SOS to all the ships everywhere on earth. Isn’t that right, Ruth?”

  Wordlessly she nodded. Come on, come on, help me out, he chided her. She hung on to the side of the boat with both hands, probably a wise precaution. If a wave came up, it might bounce them out, into the liquid disgust they had made of the water …

  Dear God in Heaven, please. Please, for Matt.

  “It’s going like this.” John covered his nose and mouth with his hand and made his voice low and mysterious. “Double-o seven, come get Matt. He’s twenty-six latitude by fifty-one longitude. Got on his raddest shirt. Hair’s too long.”

  Matt didn’t smile. His big eyes danced in front of John as the boat bobbed over the waves.

  John shifted his gaze from his child to Donna, who was swiping blood off her arms. Good Lord, the cat had done a job on them. Long, angry cuts a quarter-inch deep ran from the insides of her elbows to her wrists.

  “Salt water,” he said.

  She took a long look at the water. Made a face. Something down there, maybe, something you couldn’t get a permit for, and he was telling her to clean her wounds with it. He tried to form an explanation about parts per million, dilution; he knew she’d tell him that was a load of crap or horseshit or something else equally demure. Cops possessed amazingly crude vocabularies.

  “Well, shit,” she murmured, turning around on her knees. With an elbow over her purse, he noted. She started splashing the ocean onto her arms. Grimaced but said nothing.

  “Next time, go directly across the wrists,” he advised. “It’ll be quicker.”

  She even managed a laugh. She was a pistol. She and Ramon had made a truce of sorts, at least for the duration of their stay in the lifeboat. There was something in her purse that made Ramón nervous and her more secure. A gun. Of course.