Benchley, Peter (2 page)

Gail said, “Are you sure you should dive again?”

“Why not? I told you, that hand’s nothing. I’ll wrap it so it doesn’t bleed in the water and attract any enemies.”

Gail began to assemble her equipment. She screwed her regulator to the valve on the top of her air tank, then turned the knob that opened the tank. With a sharp

pfft

air rushed into the regulator. She pressed the purge button, to flush any residual water from the mouthpiece, and air hissed loudly from the rubber tube. She adjusted her weight belt, a nylon strap with three two-pound lead weights threaded on it; then dipped her flippers in the water and slipped them on her feet, rinsed her mask, spat on the inside of the faceplate, and rubbed the saliva around

the glass to prevent fogging. She stood her tank upright and checked the lengths of the harness straps.

“Ready to give me a hand?” she asked. She looked at Sanders and saw that he had not started to put on his tank. He had been watching her. “What’s the matter?”

He smiled and shook his head. “Nothing. I think I’m losing my mind, that’s all.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve been sitting here, getting turned on just watching you spit in your mask.”

Gail laughed. “You want to dive naked? We could conduct an experiment.”

“My research indicates,” Sanders said gravely, “that an ejaculation occurring more than thirty-three feet below sea level could cause a backup in the system, resulting in the blowing out of the brains.”

He stood, picked up her tank, and held it until she had put her arms through the straps.

She said, “There are no reserves on these tanks.”

“You won’t need a reserve. There’s only twenty or twenty-five feet of water here, and you should be able to get an hour out of a tank. More, maybe, if you’re careful.”

Gail sat on the gunwale, her back to the water, and took a breath from her mouthpiece. “Good air.”

“It better be. If they’re giving us bad air, this’Us be one short honeymoon.”

“How long will you be?”

“A minute. Go ahead over, but don’t go down till you’ve had a good look around. You don’t want to be surprised by anything waiting down there.”

Gail rolled backward off the gunwale and disappeared in a cloud of bubbles.

Sanders found a piece of rag and wrapped it around his hand. Then he gathered together his gear, put it on, and went over the side.

It took several seconds for his bubbles to dissipate and his vision to clear.

Shafts of sunlight streaked through the blue, dappling the sand and coral. The water was pellucid; Sanders guessed he could see for more than a hundred feet.

Treading water a few feet below the surface, he turned slowly around, searching the crepuscular limits of his vision for any potential danger. A pair of jacks darted in and out of the rocks. He looked down and saw Gail on the bottom, digging in the sand with her fingers. A small grouper hovered beside her, waiting for any morsels-worms or tiny crustaceans-that might float toward him in the cloud of sand stirred up by her digging. Sanders kicked slowly downward, swallowing to clear his ears as the pressure increased.

When he reached bottom, he saw that they had landed in a kind of amphitheater, a bowl on three sides of which coral and rock rose steeply toward the surface. The fourth, the seaward side, was open.

There the boat lay placidly on the surface, the anchor line angling down from way forward of Sanders to a spot in the rocks behind him. The only sounds he heard were the soft whistle of his inhalation and the bubbly rattle as he exhaled.

He looked around, trying to discern shapes in the distance where transparent blue dwindled into dim mist. As always when he had not dived for several months, he felt a

tingle of excitement, a mild but thrilling blend of agoraphobia and claustrophobia: he was alone and exposed on a wide plain of sand, certain that he could be seen by creatures he could not see; yet he was encased, too, by thousands of tons of water whose gentle but insistent pressure he could feel on every inch of his body.

He rose off the bottom and swam to his right, to the end of the line of rocks. Creeping along the rocks, he looked for anything that might signal the presence of a wreck: metal or glass or wood. He swam around the whole bowl and found nothing. Moving to the center of the bowl, toward Gail, he tapped her on the shoulder. When she looked up, he spread his hands and raised his eyebrows, as if to say: Where do you think it is? She shrugged and held up a piece of glass, the bottom of a bottle. He waved a hand contemptuously: Forget it, worthless. He motioned for her to follow.

Together they swam to the left. At the edge of the bowl, the rocks and coral continued in a fairly straight line. A school of bright blue-and-yellow surgeonfish fluttered by. A streak of sunlight danced over a piece of mustard-colored coral, its surface smooth, inviting touch. Sanders pointed to it and shook his index ringer, warning her away. Then he pantomimed the sensation of being burned. Gail nodded: fire coral, whose mucous skin caused terrible pain.

They kicked their way along the reef, followed by the grouper, which evidently still harbored a primitive hope that something edible would result from their visit.

Sanders felt a tug at his ankle. He looked back at Gail. Her eyes

were wide, and she was breathing much faster than normal.

She pointed to the left.

Sanders followed her hand and saw, hanging motionless, staring at them with a white-rimmed black eye, an enormous barracuda. Its body was as sleek and shiny as a blade, its prognathous lower jaw ajar, showing a row of ragged, needle teeth.

Sanders took Gail’s left hand, turned her diamond ring so the stone faced her palm, and balled her hand into a fist. For emphasis, he held up his own clenched fist. Gail nodded, tapped herself on the chest, and pointed upward. Sanders shook his head: No. Gail insisted, frowning at him.

Vm

going up, she was saying; you stay here if you want.

She kicked hard for the surface. Sanders blew an annoyed breath and followed.

“You want to quit?” he said as they boarded the boat.

“No. I want to rest for a minute. Barracudas give me the creeps.”

“He was just passing by. But you should have left your ring in the boat. Flashing that stone around is asking for trouble.”

“Why?”

“They’ll mistake it for prey. The first time I ever dove on a reef, I had a brass buckle on my bathing suit. The instructor told me to cut it off. I said the hell with it; I wasn’t about to ruin a fifteen-dollar bathing suit. So the guy took a knife and tied it to the end of a stick and set it in the sand, blade up. We were five or six feet away from the knife, and the instructor kept wiggling the stick, which made the blade flash in the sunlight.

He only had to wiggle

it four or five times before a big barracuda came by and stared at the knife. The instructor wiggled it again, and bango! Faster’n you could see, that fish hit the knife. He hit it again and again, cut his mouth to ribbons, but every damn time the blade moved he’d hit it again. And every time he hit it I imagined he was hitting my belt buckle, or right nearby. I never wore that suit again, except in a pool.”

Gail removed her rings and tucked them in a cubbyhole in the steering console.

“One more thing,” Sanders said. “When there are just the two of us diving, one of us has to be the leader of the pack.”

“Why do we need a leader?” Gail thought he was kidding. “Are you on a power trip?”

“No, dammit,” Sanders said, more sharply than he had intended. “It’s just that underwater we have to do things together. We have to know where each other is, all the time.

Like then: If that had been a shark instead of a barracuda, and you wouldn’t listen to me and shot for the surface, we’d be in a hell of a mess.”

“A shark! Around here?”

“Sure. Chances are they won’t bother you, but they’re around. And if one does come along, you don’t want to do something stupid.”

“Like?”

“Like panicking and rushing for the surface. As long as you have air, the best thing to do is stay on the bottom and find shelter in the reef. As soon as you start for the surface

especially if you’re scared and swimming in a hurry-you become prey. And

on

the surface, you’re lunch.”

“Suppose I run out of air.”

“You share my air and we wait for a chance to come up together. Unless he’s a real monster, we’d have a pretty good chance of making it to the boat.” Sanders saw that the talk of sharks was making Gail nervous.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Just don’t do anything without checking with me.”

Gail looked at him and drew a deep breath.

“Okay.” She put her face over the side and looked through her mask into the water. “You think that barracuda’s gone?”

“Probably.”

She continued to look underwater for a moment more, scanning the bottom. She was about to take the mask out of the water when she saw something big and brown behind the boat. “Hey, what’s that?” she said, passing the mask to Sanders.

“Where?” He leaned over the side.

“Behind us. About as far as you can see.”

“It’s a timber. I’ll be damned. There it is.”

Sanders uncleated the anchor line and let the boat drift backward a few more yards. “Let’s have a look.”

“What did the bell captain say it was called?

Goliath?”

“Yes.

Goliath:”

They went overboard together, and as soon as their bubbles had risen away, they could see debris on the bottom. A long thick timber lay at right angles to the reef. Rotten wooden planks littered the white sand. Sanders touched Gail’s shoulder and she looked at him. He grinned and put thumb and index finger together in the “okay” sign. She responded with the same sign.

They swam along the bottom at the base of the reef. Gail found a rusted can, its seams burst and jagged. From a crevice in the rocks Sanders pulled a Coke bottle, intact. Gail lay on the bottom and dug beneath the near end of the big timber.

She found a fork and part of a plate. Sanders saw something sticking out of the sand at the far end of the timber.

He dug around it until he discovered what it was: the fluke of a huge anchor. Gail motioned that she was going up. He followed her.

Treading water on the surface, Gail spat out her mouthpiece and said, “Let’s go over the reef.”

“Why?”

“It looks like this is just the last bit of the bow.

There’s got to be more of her on the other side.”

“Okay. But be careful of the surge as you’re going over, and once you start to run out of air, don’t screw around. Head for the boat.”

Seaward of the reef, the bottom looked like a trash heap. Pieces of wood, rusted iron, and coral-covered metal were scattered everywhere. From the sand Gail plucked a pewter cup. One side was caved in, and the handle was rippled with dents, but otherwise the cup was undamaged. At the foot of the reef, Sanders saw an impossibly round ring of coral. He picked it up, held it to his face, and smiled at Gail. It was the remains of a brass porthole. Gail dug in the area where she had found the cup, and soon she had amassed a small pile of flatware-forks and spoons and knives, all gnarled and scarred.

She swam over to Sanders, who was poking in the crannies of the reef. Near the bottom of the reef there was a coral overhang: the coral stopped two or three feet from the sand, and there seemed to be a small cave underneath. She tapped Sanders and pointed to the overhang. He shook his head-no-and held one hand with the other, telling her that something might be living in the cave, something that would grab a probing hand.

They separated. Gail swam back to the area where she had found the forks and spoons; Sanders continued to poke in the reef. He came to another cave, slightly larger than the one he had warned Gail away from. He bent down and peered beneath the coral overhang. It was forbiddingly dark inside, and he was about to turn away and look elsewhere when a glint, a tiny flicker of reflection, made him look again.

Holding a rock to steady himself, he stared at the shimmering object, trying to guess what it could be.

He looked at his rag-wrapped hand, and an image came to mind: a photograph he had seen of a man’s hand soon after it had been bitten by a moray eel. The flesh had been tattered, and the bone showed sickly white. He hesitated, hearing the pulse thumping in his temples, and he knew he was breathing too fast. He felt fear; he detested the feeling. He stared at his hand and willed it toward the mouth of the cave.

Taking a deep breath, he shot his hand forward to the glitter. His fingers closed on something small, fragile; he snapped his hand back out of the darkness.

In his palm was a glass container about three inches long, tapered at both ends. It was full of a clear, yellowish liquid.

As he backed away from the cave, Sanders noticed that drawing breath was becoming difficult. He swam over to Gail-stopping briefly to collect a few relics he had left at the base of the reef-and touched her. When she looked up, he drew a ringer across his throat. She nodded and repeated the gesture.

Sanders rose toward the surface. Gail lingered long enough to gather a handful of forks and spoons-already, after only a few minutes, the gentle current had covered one spoon with a patina of sand-then followed him. Together they crossed over the reef and swam to the boat.

“Beautiful!” Gail said, as she removed her weight belt and flippers. “That is

fantastic.”

In the bottom of the boat, next to Gail’s forks, spoons, and pewter cup, were the items Sanders had collected: a chipped, but whole, butter plate; a rusted, dented flare pistol; a straight razor; and what looked like a pebbly lump of coal.

“What’s that?” she said, pointing to the lump.

“There could be metal in it. When they stay in sea water for a long time, some metals develop this black stuff around them. Later on, we’ll bang it open with a hammer and see if there’s anything inside.” Sanders opened his right hand and withdrew the ampule from beneath the rag wrapped around it. “Look,”

he said, and passed it to Gail.