“Time for me to turn in,” I said briskly. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
He hesitated for a few seconds longer, scanning my face for encouragement, then turned and went upstairs to the stateroom. I put the Smith & Wesson under the little pillow and climbed under the blankets in my jeans and shirt. Despite the noise of the engines and the lurching of the ship, I went to sleep almost immediately and slept soundly through the night.
The cooks woke me the next morning before six as they started clattering around in the galley next to the captain’s dining room. I tried pulling the bedding up over my ears but the disturbance was too persistent. Finally I got up and stumbled up to the next floor where the bathroom was. I changed my underwear and shirt and brushed my teeth.
It was too early for me to feel like eating, even though breakfast was ready, so I went out on deck to look at the day. The sun had just come up, a ball of liquid orange low in the eastern sky. A purple shoreline lay a mile or so to our left. We were going past some more of the small clumps of islands which had dotted the channel as we left Thunder Bay.
At breakfast Captain Bemis, the chief engineer, and Bledsoe were all in affable moods. Perhaps the fact I was leaving soon cheered them up. At any rate, even the captain was gracious, explaining our course to me. We were coming down the southeast coast of Lake Superior leading into the St. Mary’s Channel. “This is where the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in 1975,” he said. “It’s the best approach to the St. Mary’s, but it’s still a very shallow route, only thirty feet deep in places.”
“What happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald?”
“Everyone has his own theory. I don’t suppose they’ll ever know for certain. When they dove down to look at her, they found she’d been cut neatly in three pieces. Sank immediately. I’ve always blamed the Coast Guard for not keeping the channel markings in proper order. The waves were thirty feet high out here that night—one of them must have pushed the Fitzgerald into a trough and caused her to scrape against the bottom and snap. If they’d marked the channel properly, Captain McSorley would have avoided the shallowest spots.”
“The thing is,” the chief engineer added, “these lakers don’t have much support through the middle. They’re floating cargo holds. If they put a lot of beams through the holds they’d take up too much valuable cargo space. So you get these twenty-or thirty-foot waves out here, and they pick up a ship like this on either end. The middle doesn’t have any support and it just snaps. You go down very quickly.”
The head cook, a thick Polish woman in her mid-fifties, was pouring the captain’s coffee. As the chief spoke, she dropped the cup on the floor. “You should not talk like that, Chief Engineer. It is very bad luck.” She called to her underlings to come in and clean up the mess.
Sheridan shrugged. “It’s all the men do talk about when there’s a storm brewing. Ship disasters are like cancer—the other guy is always the one who’s going to get it, anyway.” All the same, he apologized to the cook and changed the subject.
Bemis told me we’d be getting into the Soo locks around three o’clock. He suggested that I watch from the bridge so I could see the approach and the way the ship was steered into the channel. After lunch I packed up my little canvas bag for a quick departure: Bledsoe told me we’d have about two minutes to climb over the side of the Lucella onto shore before they opened the lock gates and she went on through to Lake Huron.
I checked that my credit cards and cash were in my front jeans pocket and put the Smith & Wesson into the bag. There didn’t seem much point in lugging it around in the shoulder holster while I was on board. I stowed the bag next to the pilothouse while I went up on the bridge to watch the Lucella slide into the lock. We were now well into the channel of the St. Mary’s River, following a slow-moving procession.
“Your position into the locks is determined by your position when you arrive at the mouth of the channel,” Bemis explained. “So there’s a lot of racing to get into the channel first. We passed a couple of five-hundred-footers earlier this morning. I can’t stand tying up here—enforced boredom and everyone gets restless.”
“It’s expensive to tie up,” Bledsoe said sharply. “This ship costs ten thousand dollars a day to operate. She has to make every second count.”
I raised my eyebrows, trying to calculate costs in my head. Bledsoe looked at me angrily. “Yes, it’s another financial motive, Vic.”