Chapter Three
This Can’t Be the Bermuda Triangle
“Fear Death?—to feel the fog in my throat, the mist in my face. . . No! Let me taste the whole of it, fare like. . .the heroes of old; Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life’s arrears of pain, darkness and cold.”
I stared at the same lines of the poem, rereading it for the third time, yet I was still mystified as to the meaning behind the words of Robert Browning’s poem. Or rather, why had Robert Simmons chosen this particular book of poems to give me for my birthday? Something romantic seemed like it would have been more appropriate.
I felt the boat slow down, and closed the thin book of poems Robert had given me. Had Luke given him the hint that I considered poetry my one vice? Or, had Robert given me the poems with a hidden meaning of his own? Perhaps identifying with him being Robert Browning to my being Elizabeth Barrett?
Death is not something an eighteen-year-old want to think about very much, Mr. Simmons. Thank you very much for reminding me how vulnerable we humans truly are. I would prefer to think myself invincible; impervious to death.
I looked over at Uncle as he pulled the throttle all the way back and slipped the engine into neutral. Uncle and I had reached his latest hotspot, as he called it. A spot on the GPS where he had last found good shrimping below the waves. It was where we would begin shrimping tonight.
Uncle couldn’t leave the marina during the day, so we always shrimped at night. I didn’t mind, really. Besides it was cooler at night. Less boat traffic. I sure didn’t have any other night life holding me back—unless Robert Simmons changed all that in the near future. That would be nice.
“Ready?” Uncle asked rhetorically, not really expecting an answer. It was time to rig out the boat; as simple as that. No question about it. He gave me a tight smile, his brows beetled together in a scowl--a sure sign he was still aggravated with me. I had forgotten to fill Storm Runner’s fuel tank before leaving to do my community service.
Luke and Andrew had been able to leave the marina with The Nauti-Boys thirty minutes ahead of us because Uncle had been stuck cooling his heels while I fueled up.
Death was the last thing wanted to think about out here on the open ocean. I slipped down into the cabin to put the book of poems into my backpack with a shudder.
Coming back up into the fresh air, I pulled myself up onto the boat’s port rail, balancing there by holding onto a guiderail attached to the roof of Storm Runner’s cabin. I walked up the catwalk to the bow and undid the port line that held the boat’s folded metal outrigger fast to the boat’s side.
Uncle was doing the same on the starboard side of the boat. I let the port boom swing outward. Still gripping the line, I walked back down the catwalk, grabbed the roof of the cabin with both hands and swung back down to the deck and tied off my side of the boom with a sturdy half hitch to a cleat mounted onto the stern of the boat.
I used the lazy line to pull the tail bag close enough to grab. I tied it off with a series of shrimper’s knots. I had just tossed it back into the water when Luke’s disembodied voice blared out of the marine band radio.
“This is The Nauti-Boys calling Storm Runner. Come in, Uncle.”
Uncle nodded his head towards the radio, indicating he wanted me to answer it. He was still tying off his tail bag, and didn’t want to leave it long enough to answer the radio himself.
I don’t know why—maybe because I’d been reading about death, but I felt a chill pass over me as I reached for the microphone.
“This is Storm Runner,” I answered. “What’s up?” I asked, hearing the whine of the winch behind me lowering the nets into the aquamarine water.
“I got the starboard net caught in the wheel again.”
“Ah Hell,” I heard Uncle growl, disgusted. “He’s been letting Andrew steer again, damn it!”
Andrew could not get the hang of keeping a boat in a straight line while the shrimp nets were being raised. This was the third time this month they’d gotten a tail bag caught in the wheel.
I hugged the mike to my chest so Luke couldn’t hear Uncle’s remark and rolled my eyes. Uncle nodded, and kicked the winch into reverse.
“Uncle says we’ll be right there,” I told Luke.
“Can you see my spotlight? It should be almost due east of you.”
It wasn’t dark yet, even though the sun had set behind us to the west. I didn’t have much hope of seeing Luke’s spotlight. Nevertheless, I looked out the windshield. Sure enough, a twinkle of light sparkled on the eastern horizon. I glanced down at the compass. The needle hovered over the big florescent E, as Luke had predicted.
“I got ya, Luke,” I said into the mike.
Uncle, who heard the exchange over the whine of the winch, nodded.
“Give us a few, to get rigged in, and we’ll be there,” I told him.
“Watch out for the sea fog. There’s a large bank of it headed your way. It’s covering us as we speak.”
“Fog, you’re kidding me, right?” I looked behind us at the late afternoon sun hovering low in the west above the thin dark line that represented land and home. Back to the east, where The Nauti-Boys was stranded looked okay. If seafog had overtaken them, I couldn’t tell it by looking. “It’s clear here.”
“It won’t be for long. I’ll leave our spotlight on, but I don’t know how much good it’ll do.”
“Thanks for the warning. See you in a few.” I reached up and hung the microphone back on its hook, and turned to help Uncle rig in the booms so we could go to Luke’s rescue.
Luke and Andrew were stranded until we got there to help get their net out of the wheel. Uncle’s brows beetled even closer together as he stepped up onto the catwalk. Frankly I was relieved he was no longer focused on me. The net might have to be cut out of the wheel. It was almost dark. Not good.
I don’t know why, but I didn’t feel comfortable knowing my brothers were stranded. Damn Robert Simmons and his book of poetry to hell and back. I grimaced as I felt the shivery feeling of a cat walking over my grave. I didn’t need anything like that on my mind as I focused on making the boat ready to fly to my brothers rescue. Not any morbid poems I couldn’t understand.
***
We had barely finished making the boat ready to cruise when the sea fog hit us. It came all at once. An eerie, milky-green blanket that covered our boat between one breath and the next. The weirdest seafog I’d ever seen.
I looked over at Uncle. “Is this fog for real?”
He shrugged. Uncle didn’t appear worried. That reassured me. Uncle had worked on the water all his life, and had dealt with almost every weather phenomena the ocean had to throw at him. I didn’t like seafog. I never had. But if Uncle wasn’t worried, then neither was I.
I turned to stare out of the blank, white, windshield. I didn’t care if we were in open water, I wasn’t comfortable with Storm Runner cruising in this eerie nothingness. Robert Browning’s words came back to haunt me as I perched on my stool, waiting. For what, I didn’t know.
Still, I wasn’t afraid, exactly. I’d learned to trust Uncle a long time ago. Something wasn’t right, though. I felt it growing inside me like a sixth sense coming to life.
I wasn’t surprised when out of nowhere, the depth finder beeped. I glanced down at the glowing green screen. It indicated we were in four feet of water. I about had a heart attack! That was way too shallow for our thirty-five foot boat. Before I could even open my mouth to call Uncle, however, the digital read out changed to one hundred eleven feet of water.
I sighed with relief. Maybe a big fish had swam under the boat, triggering the depth finder’s alarm. A hundred feet was a lot deeper than I thought we were in, but nothing to panic over.
It was only when it peaked at a thousand feet, then jumped back to fourteen feet, however, that I realized something was wrong with the depth finder itself.
I peeked over at Uncle. He was bent over, scrutinizing his cherished compass as if he had never seen it before. The compass’s ghostly green light reflected off his face, making him look like a gypsy fortune teller gazing into a crystal ball.
“Uncle?” I asked, taking in his pale face. “What’s going on?”
When he didn’t answer me, I slid off my stool and walked over to him so I could see what had him mesmerized. I glanced back up at his eerie-looking face with a raised eyebrow. The compass acted as weird as the depth finder. It floated aimlessly around its 360 degree surface, never settling anywhere. Had it lost north entirely and didn’t know how to find it again? I wondered.
“Looks like it finally broke,” I shrugged. The compass wasn’t much of a loss as far as I was concerned. Maybe Uncle would get rid of it now. It was the right height for gouging me in the hip every time I stepped down into the cabin.
“My father gave me that compass when I was your age.”
“Sheesh that must have been a century ago—at least.”
Uncle gave me one of his looks, and went back to staring into the compass. Apparently he didn’t think that was very funny.
“Well, it did choose a mighty odd time to break, don’t you think? The depth finder’s broken, too.”
“Huh?” Uncle looked up from the compass again.
“Yeah. Come take a look.”
Uncle’s freckles looked stark against his pale skin as he studied the read out. I had been puzzled by the depth finder and the compass, but I never even thought about being afraid—until I saw his face.
Uncle and I both flinched when we heard the GPS make a loud crackling sound. We looked over at the LCD screen with trepidation.
The hair stood straight up on my arms as I watched the GPS shutting down and re-booting as if it had picked up a virus. How could something have happened to all our instruments at once? Was that even possible?
It suddenly dawned on me that every instrument on board that was supposed to tell us where we were had simultaneously quit on us. That’s when I got really scared. Uncle and I both glanced at each other at the same time.
“Luke and Andrew,” we said simultaneously.
***
“Try calling Luke again. See if he’s having any instrument trouble,” Uncle said.
I did as Uncle asked, though I wasn’t even surprised when nothing happened. The radio was dead, too. Of course. All my internal alarm bells sent frissons shooting all over me.
“Have you tried your cellphone?” Uncle asked, drumming his fingers on the littered dash.
Instead of answering, I dipped my head under the low overhang of the doorway, and stepped down into the faint oil, dried fish, and diesel smell permeating the cabin. It clung to the walls no matter how much I scrubbed them down. I held my breath and reached for my backpack.
I kept my cellphone in a water-proof case inside it whenever I was out shrimping. Dead as a door nail. No big surprise there. Cellphones were always the first thing to go in any crisis.
I shook my head at Uncle when I came back up to the wheelhouse, letting out a pent-up breath.
I must be a transparent broadcaster, because Uncle picked up on my fear immediately. I couldn’t help it if I was worried about Luke and Andrew.
“They can’t be too far away, Storm,” he told me. “We were almost to them when the fog set in.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, looking askance at him.
“It’s only ordinary sea fog. No big deal. Happens all the time.”
Uncle’s words said everything was cool, but I glanced down at his hands. They clenched and unclenched the spokes on the steering wheel as if it was their fault all this had happened.
“Sheeh! You’re not worried about that, are you?” I laughed nervously.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“No, but you were thinking it. I saw that look on your face.”
“What look?”
“You know what look. We’re nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle. It’s hundreds of miles east of us.”
Uncle shrugged, his eyes shifting away from mine.
“Well, isn’t it?”
Uncle shrugged again, and stared doggedly ahead, even though there wasn’t anything to see.
“Oh for Pete’s sake,” I said, getting angry, and yes, frightened, too. I wanted Uncle to reassure me, and it wasn’t happening. “You can’t be serious,” I huffed, and turned to stare out the windshield.
Luke, Andrew, and I had had to listen to Uncle and his cronies swapping tales about the Bermuda Triangle, our whole lives.
All their creepy tales started out with weird fog and instruments going crazy or not working at all—like what was happening to us!
But give me a break. This is the twenty-first century. Who believes in old wives tales anymore?
The only thing . . . it’s like saying you don’t believe in ghosts when you’re alone at night in the middle of a cemetery.
It was one thing to belittle Uncle’s superstitious nonsense when I was safely on shore. Out here, in this creepy fog, my right brain kept screaming, “Oh My God! It’s true!” no matter how much my left brain tried to calm me down by reassuring me the Bermuda Triangle was a load of bull.
It was merely coincidence all this was happening. Exactly, my right brain thought, just like in the Uncle’s old wives tales. Right?
Tired of arguing with myself, I lifted the windshield out of my way and propped it open with a two-by-two Uncle kept on the dash. It didn’t help me see any better, but at least it got rid of the drops of moisture running down the Plexiglas in crooked runnels that refracted the boat lights like some macabre red and green icicles.
“Uncle, tell me the truth,” I said, turning to him. “Have you ever seen a fog like this?”
Uncle grunted instead of shrugging this time. He peered intently out through the now open windshield. Without warning, his eyes narrowed and he spun the wheel with both hands.
I squinted through the open windshield myself. “Oh My God!” I gasped.
Like some doomed ghost ship out of a scary movie, The Nauti-Boys loomed out of the thinning layer of fog not four boat lengths in front of us. Its spotlight still pointed skyward, beaming their location to the heavens. The light beam waved erratically in time with the rocking of the boat like some zombie robot on a late night creep show.
I heard a terrified scream and wondered where it came from before realizing the piercing sound was coming from my own throat.