The Divers and Other Mysteries of Seattle

by Jerome Gold

  As they were changing into their clothes, Harry said, “I wish we could have killed it. It’s going to starve.”

  “It’s a state park. You can’t do anything about what you see. If the rangers catch you, they’ll fine the shit out of you.”

  “You can’t do anything about what you see.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “I know.”

  “In a way, that’s what I like most about diving. You’re the alien. It’s like you’re a guest on another planet and one of the rules is you can look, but you can’t touch, at least not in a protected area.”

  “Even if you see suffering.”

  “Yeah. Even then. It’s rough.”

  “Well, you’re right when you say it’s like being on another planet. For me, it’s like stepping into a science fiction novel, and the beings in it don’t give a damn about you as long as you don’t try to eat them. It’s their world and you’re going to be there for only a few minutes. The problem comes when we care about them. We want to put an end to their suffering, or what we imagine is their suffering, even if we have to kill them to do it.”

  “Whoa, Harry. You’ve been reading too much. I just do it for fun.”

  “Oh no, my furry friend. I know you. You’re lying to yourself.”

  “I know, but it’s a good lie.” Bruce giggled like a ten-year-old. “My furry friend,” he said, looking at Harry. He repeated the child’s laugh.

  Harry had used to dive with a man who had retired from teaching. Harry asked him once if he missed it. Every day, he said. He missed the kids. He missed watching them develop into something more than they had been, or at least something different. But he did not miss the administration. He did not miss its insistence on teachers giving up something that worked for something that didn’t. He did not miss taking orders from people who had no experience of the classroom, or who ignored what they had learned when they were teachers. He did not miss the ideologues, the religionists, or the false patriots. Eventually he realized that his daily experience with kids no longer compensated for everything about the administration that so weighed on him. He felt his life no longer had balance and he decided to retire. He became a fine printer, using an old Chandler and Price letterpress to produce chapbooks and the occasional perfect-bound book.

  Harry thought about what Mark had said, especially the part about compensation and balance, and thought too about what he might do if he gave up the prison. His father had left him some money and he thought he could live off it for a couple of years if he had to. He wrote a letter of resignation, leaving space for date and signature, folded it into a small rectangle and put it in his wallet.

  They were Dungeness. Harry was at seventy feet when he saw them, Bruce on his right and a little above. The crab were moving in a column of twos toward the beach, coming up from where it was too dark to see them and too deep to dive. Every few meters Harry saw one or two out at either side of the column, like flank scouts. Two crab in the column, marching side by side, grasped something thin and white like a piece of a tee shirt between them, the left claw of one and the right claw of the other clamped on its far edges. Only these two carried anything; the others followed them at regular intervals or marched ahead of them. Harry swam to the front of the column where it was nearing a savannah of eelgrass. Ten meters ahead of the main body was a cluster of five proceeding in a star configuration, and to each side of the star, ten or twelve feet out, was a single crab moving in unison with those that made up the star’s points.

  Harry motioned to Bruce to come toward him. They were above the foremost part of the column, the forward scouts in the eelgrass now. Bruce descended until he was a meter above the column. It stopped, the crab directly below him standing erect, their claws up. Bruce pushed at the water before him with his hands, and kicked. He began to rise.

  Harry went out toward the point element and swam down, intending to grab one of them. They scattered and he selected the one closest to him and went after it into the eelgrass. It was surprisingly fast, faster than he was. He had chased crab before, for fun or food, but he had never come on one that could outrun him. He was astounded at its speed. He wanted to try another, but Bruce was in front of him, showing him with his hands that he had only six hundred pounds of air left. Harry looked at his gauge. The needle was a little below five hundred. Harry nodded his head and they swam together toward the beach.

  “Have you ever seen anything like that?”

  “No. Have you?”

  Harry shook his head. “I’ve heard of lobster migrations, but I’ve never heard of crab doing it.”

  “That one little guy was fast. I saw you running after him.”

  “Yeah. I wonder if they’re faster just after they molt and have new shells.”

  They were on the beach at Mukilteo, stripped down to their bathing suits, letting the sun warm them. The drying salt pulled the skin tight on Harry’s back and face. It was a wonderful sunny day; when they went in the water, it was gray and drizzly. Harry felt very good. He felt a sense of completeness as he hardly ever did after a dive, and never in anything else he did. It was the combination of sun and warmth and the salt drying and the effort he had made in going after that crab.

  “What do you think of that white thing those two crab were holding onto?”

  “That thing like a shirt, or what was left of one? Yeah. I’m trying not to think about that,” Bruce said.

  “They eat us and we eat them.”

  “Stop.”

  “The things we’ve seen,” Harry said. “Remember that half-blind lingcod at Edmonds?”

  “Yeah. Yeah.”

  “And that skate as big as a barn door?”

  “You told me about it. They don’t get as big as barn doors, though.”

  “Little barns. For Shetland ponies.”

  Bruce gave out a laugh that ended in a snort.

  “I once saw two eels mating,” Harry said. “They were pure white. I mean whiter than anything I’d ever seen, or seen since. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at. All I saw was this white ball about the size of a soccer ball, about twenty feet down. This was in Samoa at a break in the reef by Faga’alu.”

  “Say that again.”

  “Faga’alu. It’s the name of a village. I lived there for a while after I left the army. After a lot of things. I was snorkeling and I saw this white ball on the sand right below me. And then it split apart and it was two snow-white eels, whiter even than snow. And they faced each other and then came together again, almost in a fury, it happened so fast and so violently. Maybe it was real fury, whatever that might be to eels. In a second they were so wrapped around each other you could not see where one left off and the other began. I remember thinking, ‘Maybe that’s why they call it balling.’ But how many people have seen eels balling? I had a friend there, Chuck Brugman, who had spent most of his life diving in the Pacific, and I asked him if he’d ever heard of white eels, but he hadn’t.”

  “Maybe they were congers.”

  “Congers are gray.”

  “Albino congers?” He was being impish.

  “Who knows. Though this was in daylight and the sun was directly on them.”

  “Yeah, you’d think they’d stay indoors during the day and watch TV. Or sleep. They could have been vampire albino congers.”

  Harry stared at him. Bruce laughed but Harry continued to stare.

  “Don’t say it,” Bruce said. “You’re thinking, ‘Speaking of balling, what’s Janice been up to?’ But I don’t want to hear it.”

  Harry laughed. He couldn’t help it. “Goddamn! We’ve known each other too long.”

  Bruce laughed again, not the little-boy laugh or the snorting laugh or any other that bespoke something else, but one that was straightforward and unaffected, and then he said, “I didn’t know you lived in Samoa. My grandfather was there during the war. World War Two.”

  “I had an odd experience in Samoa once. I was diving with Chuck on the reef a
t Faganeanea—“

  “Jeez. These names. Call it something else. Call it Albert.”

  “You call it Albert.” Harry was annoyed. He wanted to tell this story and he wanted to tell it without bowdlerizing it. “So I was out with Chuck and we left the boat and were following the anchor chain down, and Chuck peeled off at about forty feet—he had said he was going to look for a particular shell he had spotted there on another dive—but I decided to go a little farther and then, without even thinking about it, I was on the bottom at a hundred and thirty-five feet.”

  “Were you using nitrogen?”

  “They don’t have that there. Just compressed air.”

  “Jesus, Harry.”

  “I know. But that’s what I did. I had expected to feel the effects of narcosis—you know, nausea, loss of peripheral vision—“

  “I don’t get nauseated.”

  “Okay, but I do. But this time I didn’t. So I’m on the bottom and I look around and in the distance is a blue light, like a wall coming up off the floor of the ocean, like the aurora borealis but a bright, metallic blue, and I start swimming toward it—“

  “Jesus.”

  “I know. And I swim for a while but I’m not getting any closer, and then it occurs to me: I’m alone at a hundred and thirty-five feet and I’m swimming toward something that may not exist and I’m gobbling air like there will always be more than I need, and I check my air gauge and there’s enough left so that, if I suck every last ounce out of the tank, I can get back to the surface even with decompression. And so I go back to the anchor chain and start climbing back up. I pass Chuck on the way—he’s still messing around on the reef, near the surface now—and I wave to him but I don’t stop. It’s really hard to get air now. It’s like I’m looking for it, but it’s at a premium and it’s hiding—well, you know how it feels to run out of air. And I pop the surface and clamber up on the boat and take my gear off and wait to see if I get a headache. Sometimes, if I haven’t decompressed long enough, I get a headache, but this time I don’t. And then Chuck is on the surface and he hands me his fins and he gets himself up onto the boat and he asks me if I saw that big blacktip on the reef, he was trying to point it out to me when I was on my way up, but either I didn’t see him sign or I didn’t understand what he was saying. Which was probably to my benefit because I couldn’t have stopped, shark or no shark.”

  “That’s why you should always leave some air in your tank. You don’t know what’s going to happen on your way in. Or up.”

  “I know. I’m real careful now. Honest. I do wonder about that blue light though, what it was, or was it only in my head. And was there something on the other side of it, or is that how everything ends.”

  “Jeez, Harry, cut it out. You’re making me nervous. How come you didn’t have a premonition about all of this before the dive? Or did you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, where are they when you really need one?”

  “I sometimes ask myself that.”

  “Did you tell Chuck about the blue light?”

  “No. I didn’t want him to think I was a fool.”

  “I don’t know who’s the fool, to separate like that. Both of you were diving alone.”

  “Well, I used to think that as far as Chuck was concerned, if you were in the ocean at the same time he was, you were buddies.”

  “Is that when you started to like diving solo?”

  “I don’t know. I never thought about it. I don’t know.”

  At fifteen feet, he saw a brown rockfish nestled against a black rock. Some of its color was so light as to appear yellow. It was odd that it was so still. As he swam nearer, it barely moved, perhaps an inch or two, and then it settled back against the rock. Had the rock not been there, the fish would have gone completely onto its side. Its mouth opened and closed as if it were gasping for breath, though of course it was not. But its gills were working, so he knew it was alive, if in trouble.

  He swam farther out. The water was unusually clear. He had never seen such luxuriant floral growth in the Sound. A plant whose name he could never remember but which reminded him of a juniper tree extended twenty feet toward the surface. He saw flounder and some blue perch and a couple of neon green gunnels. There were plenty of jellyfish feeding on those white anemones with the fluffy crowns. He almost swam into one with five-foot-long tentacles. It was the largest he’d seen outside of the tropics or California. He could see bits of white fluff through its skin.

  On the way back to the beach, he found the rockfish in the same place he had seen it earlier. He touched its head with his finger, but it didn’t move. Neither its mouth nor its gills moved. A slight tidal surge raised him off the bottom and he took advantage of it to coast in to shore.

  All morning his shirt hung wrong on him, the neck sliding to one side, sliding again after he adjusted it. And all morning his tee shirt under it lay like needles on his skin, his body vaguely in pain. It was as though walking, sitting, standing, he were askew, as though he were somehow out of alignment. Getting into his wet suit, his muscles ached with an intensity beyond aching, and the skin on his arms and torso burned as though aflame, though only in patches. Yet he did not think to stop. Rather, it was as if he were bound to do what he would, regardless of his fear.

  They were diving off Columbia Beach. The water was calm, there was no wind. The bottom was sand and silt held by eelgrass. They were near the ferry dock; it would be difficult to get confused about direction even if you didn’t have a compass.

  They were in only twelve feet of water when he lost Bruce. Bruce was on his right and then he wasn’t. He wasn’t anywhere. Harry came to the surface and waited. Then he snorkeled back to the beach. A boy ten or eleven was walking toward him on the path from the restaurant parking lot above the rocks overlooking the beach. A man was behind the boy about forty feet. Harry asked the boy if he’d seen another diver within the last few minutes. The boy shook his head. Harry took his weight belt off, then his tank and buoyancy compensator. The boy and the man were watching the water that was so motionless now it might have been freighted with oil. The sun’s glare off the surface forced Harry to turn his eyes away. He had the sensation that he had stepped outside of time and he looked at his watch to see how much time had passed since they entered the water. He asked the man to call the Coast Guard and the Sheriff’s Office. He would wait where he was in case Bruce turned up.

  The man had just started up the hill when Bruce stood up out of the water. He had a rockfish thrashing on the shaft of his spear and he was carrying his fins. His lips moved and then he let go of the spear and fell into the water.

  “I can’t breathe. I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  Harry got Bruce’s weights and tank and b.c. off and, with the help of the man, got him to the beach and laid him on his back on the sand.

  “I can’t breathe.”

  He hardly had the words out when his irises rolled up inside his head. Harry performed CPR, alone at first, then with another man who suddenly appeared until the ambulance arrived and the medical technicians took over. When Harry compressed his chest, Bruce’s eyes rolled forward, then rolled back when Harry stopped to blow into his mouth. But after a few minutes they froze halfway up under the lids. By the time the ambulance got there, his lips were turning blue.

  The mound of earth beside the grave was dry. It must have been excavated yesterday, maybe even the day before, Harry thought. Then he thought, Of course it was dug yesterday. Who’s going to come out here at dawn to dig a grave?

  He had not seen Janice in almost two years. He had forgotten how compact she was, how boyish her face. He had always expected to see a smudge of dirt on her cheek or nose. He saw Bruce’s father whom he had met once, but did not say anything to him. Bruce’s father saw him too, but also chose not to speak.

  Walking to his car after the service, he heard a woman’s heels and turned and saw Janice walking rapidly in his direction.

  “Harry.”

 
; The embrace felt good. Her fragrance was nice.

  “I hoped I would see you.”

  “It’s good to see you,” he said.

  “His family ignored me. Even Jennifer. It was as if we had never met.”

  “They always were sort of self-contained. They ignored me too.”

  “It was his heart, wasn’t it? Somebody said it was.”

  “That’s what it looked like. I don’t know if they did an autopsy.”

  “His uncle also died of a heart attack when he was really young. His father must be wondering about the genes he passed on.”

  “Does his father think like that?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t know him very well. You were there, weren’t you? With Bruce? When he died?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Harry nodded his head.

  “He was a good friend to me,” Janice said. “He was my good friend.” Harry thought she would cry after she said it the second time, but all there was was a catch in her voice which she quickly swallowed. “Even after all this time. I could tell him anything, because he knew me so well.”

  She was looking at the pavement. She was smiling. She looked up at him.

  “You haven’t changed, Harry. I was hoping you hadn’t. It’s nice when something remains the same.”

  They were standing at his car. The morning chill had faded and the sun was warm on his face.

  “What about you? How have you been?” he asked.

  “I’ve been well. I’m in the doctoral program now.”

  “Arizona?”

  “Yes. Archeology. I actually like it. I was surprised that I took to it so well. I was afraid I would hate it.”

  Was her front tooth chipped? No, that was his imagination.

  “Well,” he said.

  “I have to go. I have to catch a plane at one. I have to be at a conference in the morning and I still need to rehearse my presentation. It’s okay, I rented a car. Did I tell you I met someone? I’ll call you and tell you about him.”