Dead in the Water

  Like being brushed with a web, or a net.

  A net. And the Morris was a big grouper, lumbering straight into it—

  “C’mon,” he said to Matt. He pushed himself away from the container and hurried down the passage between the mountains of boxcars; and hurried faster, because for some reason he couldn’t explain, he had to get out of there immediately.

  Back on his barrel, Cha-cha dangled his feet over the side of the ship and crossed his legs. He wiped his fingers with the chocolate-coated Butterfinger wrapper and stuffed it into his back pocket.

  His Oceanic Highness retired for the evening, sinking majestically into the sea. Cha-cha waved, and sat, and watched the stars come out. The water sluiced beneath the bow like the rush of freeway traffic outside an opened window. This was the most peaceful time of day: meals behind him, the king attended to, nothing to do but sit and watch. Behind him, on the bridge, Mr. Saar said something into the public address system, and someone answered him. Cha-cha couldn’t make it out.

  He should go astern and check his fishing lines and his nets. He smiled. Tomorrow there’d be good eating. Dorado, probably. Wished he could make blackened Cajun style again, but last time they’d thought there was a fire in the galley. Whoo-ee! What a trip! All that fire extinguisher stuff all over everything.

  He’d have to tell the little love baby about that one. He’d like that story.

  And the one about the loggerhead sponges. Now that was the worst tale of the sea:

  Baby shrimps, too young to know what’s going to happen, swim into the cavities of loggerhead sponges, maybe because they think it’s groovy, or they’re curious, who knows? And they start eating and growing and pretty soon, they’re too big to get back out. And they can’t see where they’re going because it’s too dang dark, so they spend their lives stumblin’ around these corridors in the sponge, scraping the sides with their claws for food, which is mostly rotten garbage.

  And if that wasn’t heavy enough, love baby, creeping through black halls for the rest of your life, they have to defend themselves against thousands of other shrimp, and worms, and all kinds of other enemies that have gotten stuck coming in from the opposite direction. Somebody has to get out of the way, but nobody can, so there’s lots of bad stuff coming down, all the time.

  That’s their life, scraping food, fighting enemies, in a chamber of horrors God made on bad acid.

  Then they have babies, and those babies swim off, and if they’re lucky, they get imprisoned inside another sponge. If they’re not, they float out to sea, and drown.

  And which ones make it, and which ones don’t?

  Karma, man.

  And that’s the life of a ship, love baby, and everybody aboard her, just a bunch of nineteen-year-olds, ferrying ammo up the Delta.

  4

  The Fog

  Ruth, perhaps,

  dear Ruth, perhaps,

  oh, Ruth, perhaps,

  you are the first to get the word:

  Messages come in small packages.

  Messages come in dead men’s voices.

  And here is a message for you, Ruth:

  I have heard your siren call;

  I have heard you wish your wish.

  I come to you in waves, on waves;

  Now come to me, oh, Ruth, dear Ruth.

  Come dine with me,

  Come wine with me,

  Come down to the sea,

  Come down, dear Ruth.

  Come

  down,

  down,

  down, and

  Jump

  overboard

  now.

  Ruth sat up fast, panicking as her gaze darted around the close, unfamiliar cabin. “Where …?” she asked groggily, and it came back to her: she was on a ship called the Morris, in a cabin near the end of a long corridor.

  With a shudder, she closed her eyes and blew out a breath. Her heart stuttered against her silky pink nightgown, which was damp with sweat. As she rested her weight on her wrists, they shook as though she were having some kind of seizure.

  “Heavens.” She took a deep breath. She was safe; she was all right. She was in a cabin, and the van Burens were next door, and the young policewoman’s cabin was on the other side of the bathroom.

  All right. Everything was all right.

  Her wrists wobbled as she sucked in a few more deep breaths. She had had a dream. Yes, that was it. That was all. Something about a man. An invitation. Or was it about struggling, and not inhaling … The vague outlines of an image floated behind her eyes. A ship. This ship? Too late; too hazy. It floated onward.

  “Heavens,” she said again.

  Her wedding ring caught in her hair as she pushed a stray tendril out of her eyes. She stared into the dark, rolled onto her side to check the clock. The luminous dial was a beacon in the pitch-dark cabin. Ten-fifty. Normally that was too early for her—she was an old night owl, always had been—but the movements of the ship had made her drowsy. She’d caught herself dosing in the dining room while watching Far and Away with John Fielder. Matt and Donna Almond had been sequestered in a corner, playing checkers by the light of a crook-necked lamp. Donna let Matt win most of the games, and he whooped whenever he triumphed, only to giggle and clamp his hands over his mouth when his father told him to be quiet.

  The van Burens (and Hadley) had marched straight to their cabin after dinner. Hers shared a common wall with theirs, and she had come into the cabin after refusing an offer of escort from John, to find her empty room reverberating with the gasps and groans of her neighbors’ lovemaking. A very strange couple. But then, so much was different between men and women these days. Donna was sweet, but rather hard—or acted hard, Ruth wasn’t sure which. In Ruth’s day, she might’ve been considered “fast.” The young men were flocking around her. Like that sexy but very silly Spanish man, Ramón, and John, who needed a woman’s strength just now. Poor man.

  Ruth yawned, stretched, decided to use the toilet. The head, she reminded herself. On a ship, it was called the head. For a few moments she groped around the nightstand, then found the light and flicked it on. The sheets were twisted around her—she must have had a busy night, though certainly not like the van Burens—and she pushed them down and swung her legs over the bed. Her knees brushed the wall and her bare feet touched the linoleum floor. It was damp. The ship was sinking!

  She planted her left foot, pressed down. Not soggy, just damp. The night air was humid; ocean air was full of ocean. With a click of her teeth she dismissed her panicky thought. Foolish old woman. Falling asleep watching a movie. And now imagining the ship was in trouble—

  The dream. Something like that in her dream. Herself falling into the water, having to jump in, and there was something there. She squinted, concentrating. Something in the water.

  No, it had been someone in the water. Waiting for her.

  Well, dreams like that were natural. People on planes dreamed about crashing. And people on boats …

  No, not just people on boats. People whose husbands were missing at sea, they had dreams like that.

  She rubbed her arms and pushed herself off the bed and stood practically cheek by jowl to the wall. Such a tiny cabin. Not at all like the brochure, and not even that much cheaper than flying. Well, that was all right; she wasn’t a very big woman, and she was on the sea where Stephen had sailed; traveling over the very same droplets of water, maybe even the exact location where he had—

  Her throat closed up. He had not gone down. He had not.

  She edged along the side of the bed and felt with her hand for the sliding partition to the bathroom. Her heart was finally slowing down. As she groped for the handle, she thought about the afternoon, and the way she had prickled inside, as if she’d been electrified. That awful claustrophobic pressure. She’d had a foolish thought, one she’d barely acknowledged: Perhaps Stephen had tried to contact her. To warn her that the ship wasn’t safe, that she should jum … that she should leave it. That she should have left
it. And now, the dream.

  “Oh, come now, come now,” she muttered in a tight voice through a film of tears. She was being silly. Stephen had not communicated with her. Her belief in the possibility of another world had grown only slightly stronger in the eleven months since his disappearance, though it was strong enough to pursue avenues that once she and he would have scoffed at.

  For the belief, the certainty, that he was still alive, would not leave her alone. On Oprah she’d likened it to knowing your spouse is in the next room, although you can’t see or hear him. You just know he’s home.

  You just know it.

  The flimsy partition slid open beneath her hand. To her left, the sink gleamed in the lamplight; beyond it, the toilet. Oh, gleaming throne of Psyche, she thought wryly. With a flourish, she lifted up nightgown and sat down. The floor was damp in there, too.

  Around her, the ship creaked and groaned. That vessels were so noisy had been a surprise. The engines rattled and men stomped constantly down the halls and outside on the deck, thumping in their work boots, the masses of keys fastened to their jeans with huge turnbuckles jangling like Marley’s ghost. Up and down, back and forth, and everything squeaked and squealed and shuddered. It was a miracle she’d fallen asleep with all the racket going on. The van Burens had been but one grace note in the symphony.

  She sat forward on her elbows and waited, realizing she didn’t have to go after all. With an embarrassed humph, she rose and walked the few feet back into her cabin.

  The sheets on the twin bed heaped into a long cocoon like a body. She saw the head, the shoulder, the hip, the foot, and the resemblance was unnerving. She studied it for a moment, trying to recall the last time Stephen had slept with her. Blue pajamas. The ones with the navy piping. His eyes were bluer than Paul Newman’s, she always liked to say.

  Weak yellow light cast shadows on the white sheets and the dingy walls, and the thin brown curtain that covered the porthole above her bed.

  The ship creaked. The form on the bed became nothing to her but a pile of bedclothes. Those pajamas were in the cherrywood bureau back home. All his things were in their proper places, awaiting his return. The only missing items were the clothes he’d had on—white Windbreaker, the shirt with the boat blueprints on it, the white duck trousers. His dazzling white sneakers. His wallet and keys. She doubled her fists. He was substantial, somewhere out there in the world, not an old widow’s dream made of blankets. Damn it, she knew he was alive.

  She burst into tears, missing him so badly, so terribly. Doubling her fists, she pressed them into her midsection and bent over, weeping. He was alive.

  The boat rocked. It creaked. The shadows shifted.

  Something was awry. Out of kilter. She felt it. She stood perfectly still, moving only her eyes, as a thick dread crawled over her feet, up her legs, touched her fingertips.

  Suddenly a chill rippled up her spine. She straightened. A finger of ice on each vertebra, pressing in hard, someone testing how thick her body was. Goose bumps plucked at her scalp. Her heart started racing again. Unwillingly, she slid her glance to the bed. There was nothing there that shouldn’t be.

  Nothing there that should be.

  The dread covered her chest and shoulders, closed around her neck. She held her breath.

  There. On the lamp side of her bed, the closet door was open. It gaped like an unhappy, hungry mouth. Back home in Pomona, it was part of her bedtime ritual. Here, she’d forgotten to close it, and that had startled her when she’d come back into the room.

  That’s what it was, and—

  A chill fanned her shoulders like a shawl. She shivered once, violently. This was silly, worrying about a closet door. Not even she, the quintessential creature of habit, would be so jolted by a triviality like that. It was the dream that was frightening her. She had probably heard a noise and that had awakened her from her dream, and she was still a bit disoriented.

  Pursing her lips, she shook her head. Not disoriented, not a jot. She was frightened, as she had been in the dining room that afternoon.

  The ship rolled to the right. The closet door slid shut with a crack and Ruth jumped. It slid back open, cracked again. Roll, crack. Roll, crack.

  “Is someone there?” she asked in a firm voice, though not very loud. She didn’t want the van Burens to think she was a senile old woman, given to talking to herself. Then she realized that wasn’t the question she really wanted to ask.

  “Is someone here?” She licked her lips.

  A sense. A presence. A shadow in the corner, a dark spot on the ceiling. The dampness of the floor.

  A sense. A presence.

  Oh, God. Oh, could it be?

  Her heart hammered. She didn’t dare move again, or speak. It couldn’t be; she’d never believed any of it, the table-rapping and the automatic writing. Now she saw all that for what it had been, and how she’d been going through the paces because there was nothing left to do. The Coast Guard was no longer looking for him, and no one else seemed to care.

  She hadn’t believed. Ever.

  But something was wrong.

  Yet if it were wrong, how could he be the source of it?

  A looming presence. Something that was walking closer; she could almost hear the footsteps on the clammy floor. Almost feel someone touch her hand with a finger like a frozen bone.

  “Stephen?” she rasped. “Are you … are you trying to reach me, darling?”

  Listening to herself, she flushed to her roots and stepped boldly to the foot of the bed.

  No presence. Nothing.

  Sat down hard on top of the cocoon. It deflated beneath her weight.

  Heavens, maybe she was a senile old lady. How unbelievably depressing.

  And yet, she had felt … something. She had been frightened for some reason.

  Was still frightened.

  On the other side of the wall, someone mumbled, stirred. Oh, no, she’d awakened the van Burens. She sat, poised, listening. It was stuffy in the cabin. The air hung in layers that were hard to draw in.

  She looked around the room. Nothing. And the feeling of fear was dissipating like a tide pulling itself back into the ocean.

  The van Burens made no more sounds. She sat quietly, collecting herself. The mantle of unbelief cloaked her once more, and she told herself that when she met Marion Chang, she would tell her she’d decided not to pursue—

  It was so damn hard to breathe! No wonder she was upset. She laid a hand over her chest and climbed onto the bed. Lifting her nightgown, she walked on her knees to the head and pushed the curtain away from the porthole. Some fresh air would clear her head. If the van Burens came to her door to see how she was, she’d say she’d been cursing at the porthole, trying to get it open. That it had been stuck …

  It swung open at her light touch.

  The closet door rolled and cracked, rolled and cracked. Outside, the sailors tromped and cursed and jangled their ghostly chains.

  A Spirit propelled the ship, she found herself thinking, with no idea why. It sailed the Ancient Mariner straight for perdition. He had wanted to round the Horn, and boasted to God and the devil that he could do it. His pride had lured him to his doom.

  The dream, the person in the water. Could that have been Stephen? Had she dreamed that her love was luring her to her doom?

  “Good grief,” she murmured, and thrust her head out the porthole.

  Surrounded by the night, Donna and John stood beside Ramón Diaz on the bridge. Clad in a dark blue jumpsuit, he pointed to various instruments and droned on about what they were, a very dry textbook visit for tourists. When he’d invited her up, Donna guessed, he hadn’t expected her to bring someone else along, especially not another man.

  As Kevin would say, Bummer, dude.

  She checked her watch. It was eleven-fifteen, but it felt like o-dark-thirty. Well, she’d told Ramón that sea air made her sleepy, hadn’t she? Not realizing, of course, that it was true.

  “Okay, now, this is our LORAN sy
stem. We navigate using this device,” Ramón instructed them, as if there would be a quiz at the end of the visit.

  Donna shifted her weight and surveyed the bridge, idly wishing she’d worn a sweater over her shorts and white Fruit of the Loom T-shirt. It was dark, save for a muted overhead light fixture that basically gave you a fix on things, but not a very good look. In the aft section of the room stood a large light table, now turned off, where they could lay the charts and study them, triangulate, all that jazz. A dozen charts rolled like house plans hung out of pigeonholes beneath the table, and thick books, of more charts, she assumed, leaned against each other drunkenly on a shelf above the pigeonholes. The colors of their covers had bled into the darkness; they all looked a sickening shade of mustard-yellow.

  Donna noted the wheel, small and made of gray plastic, like the kind of thing you used to find on an infant’s car seat, beep-beep, baby driver. At least it was a wheel. Ramón told them some ships were operated with joysticks.

  Glenn would have said something crude and dumb about that.

  She rubbed her nose. The circular windscreen on the upper left quadrant of the panorama window whirled around and around, a windshield wiper gone amuck. Talk about your symbols; that was how her mind was, too, trying to make a decision about Glenn. Maybe she could get it taken care of early so she could enjoy her vacation, goddamn it.

  So. The smartest and best thing to do was also the most obvious: transfer. Get another partner. There were plenty of good officers on the force who wouldn’t have a spasm over working with a woman. Not, frankly, that she wouldn’t. Cagney and Lacey had been a TV show, hon, not a rational life-style for a female person trying to survive in Macholand. How’d you like to put your life on the line for some stupid bitch mooning over a guy?

  Her throat hurt. Surreptitiously she touched her face—no tears—and wandered toward the back of the bridge. An out-of-date calendar advertised Mei Nin Chinese Foods with a large-breasted Chinese broad seated beside a waterfall. Glenn would say something stupid about that, too, like Nice melons, or I’ve got a nice big banana for her. Idiot.