Dead Sea

Smalls began pressing out his dough on the floured stainless steel table. “Funny that fog out there. Thick like that, shiny like that. Haven’t seen anything like it in years.” That gave Gosling pause. “You’ve seen this before?”

Smalls did look up now. His eyes were gray as puddles on concrete. “You telling me you’ve spent a lifetime sailing the Atlantic and you never came across anything funny out this way?”

Gosling wetted his lips. “Maybe once or twice. Minor things. Bad compass deviation… things like that. Atmospheric problems, you’d call them.”

Smalls didn’t look like he believed that. He went back to his dough, rolled it out with firm strokes of the rolling pin which was almost as big as a baseball bat. “I been on these waters going on thirty years now. Years ago, I was a deckhand on a bulk freighter. The Chester R. We were bringing a belly full of grain out to Bermuda from Charleston. About an hour out, we made radio with Hamilton. Same old, same old. Then we sailed into this fog… a lot like we got out there. It was a real mother, that fog. Thick, smelled funny, had a weird sort of shine to it.”

Gosling’s throat was dry. The comparison was pretty accurate so far. “What happened?”

“The sort of things that happen in these waters when some of that yellow fog swallows up your vessel – you know, our compass began to spin, we couldn’t find our heading. RDF went toes-up, LORAN was all tittywonkle,” he said, without a trace of emotion. “Yeah, we were spooked pretty bad. The lot of us. Radio was shit, nothing but dead air on VHF and side-band. Radar kept showing us things that were there, then gone. This was the days before GPS, but I don’t think it would have mattered. You think so?”

Gosling said he thought probably not. “How long were you in it?”

Smalls shrugged. “About an hour, according to the chrono. We were sailing blind all that time. We missed Bermuda even though we hadn’t changed our heading. A few degrees could have made us miss it, you know, could have put us on this side of the Azores we kept it up. But that’s not where we ended up. When the fog died out, we weren’t anywhere near Bermuda and we sure as hell weren’t out in the middle of the Atlantic steaming across the pond like you might think. No sir, we were due north of the Leeward Islands down in the Caribbean.”

Gosling said, “You telling me you were running east and ended up a thousand miles south of your last position? And within an hour?”

“That’s what happened, all right.” Smalls began cutting biscuits out of the dough with an aluminum cutter. “Hard to believe, ain’t it? Well, ya’ll imagine our poor captain trying to explain a navigational tanglefuck like that to the ship’s owners. Wasn’t pretty. Guess what I’m saying here, First, is that you start playing out in the Sargasso like we are and the stars are right, conditions favorable for funny business, and you run into what we’re running into. Folks these days, they call it the Bermuda Triangle and what not. But I’m old school. Sargasso to me. The Sargasso Sea. That triangle they bullshit about just touches the southern edge of the Sargasso, but most of those ships and planes that have trouble are really in the Sargasso. I should know, on account I was on one of them.”

Gosling knew Smalls too well to think that the man was spinning tales here. But the Sargasso Sea was no true mystery. It existed, all right. It was an oval region of the western North Atlantic, roughly between the east coast of the U.S., the West Indies and the Azores. Unlike other seas that were bordered by land, the Sargasso was bordered by ocean currents – the Gulf Stream, the North Atlantic, Canary, and North Equatorial – which flowed in a clockwise pattern around it, creating a deadly calm within its boundaries. Because of the calm, the Sargasso was a great floating desert of sargassum seaweed. In the old days of sail, it had been called the Sea of Lost Ships because of the many craft that had been becalmed or trapped in its vast weed banks. And in the realm of maritime folklore, it had a centuries-old reputation of disappearing vessels and derelict ships, ghost ships and sea-monsters and bizarre phenomena.

But Gosling knew those tales were just bullshit.

They couldn’t be anything else.

Modern tankers and freighters could plow through the Sargasso without hesitating. It was only smaller boats that got their props tangled with weed. And as for the rest… well, sailors liked to tell stories and you could leave it at that.

“Well, I’ll keep it in mind,” Gosling said.

“You do that,” Smalls said to him. “We’re bound to come out of it sooner or later. Maybe we’ll be on course and maybe we’ll be down by the Bahamas… or maybe we’ll be somewhere else entirely.”

Somewhere else entirely.

That last bit was loaded with allusions Gosling wasn’t about to let himself think about. Not yet. He told Smalls they’d get together and discuss it all in more depth later on and Smalls said that his calendar was wide open for the foreseeable future.