Lee Southgate, sickened and ashamed, fumbled for a wad of dollar bills without counting them. The old man snatched them and, without a word, stepped out of the car.
Southgate started the car and drove away in a hurry, not willing to glance back. And so he never saw, would never even imagine, the expression of simple childish pleasure and victory on the old man’s face.
THE TEST
WE HAD WORKED on the helmet off and on all spring, and by June when school was about over it was finished. And we thought it was beautiful. It wasn’t that much work really, but we made an occasion out of each afternoon that we spent together working on it. The three of us met in the secrecy of Bobby’s garage, smoked until our heads were whirling, and talked about all the things we were going to do when we were finished. It had been just like that a few years before when the three of us tried to make a raft out of the pieces of a tumbled-down old boathouse. I wanted to float along the St. John’s River all the way from Sanford to Jacksonville. Then the Mississippi. Then—who knows?—the Nile, the Ganges, the Amazon. When we finally got it put together and put it in the lake to see how it would float, it sank like a stone. Clearly, though, the helmet would be a useful device. My plan was to scour the lake bottoms for sunken rowboats. We’d raise them, patch, caulk, paint, and sell them. With all the money we got we’d buy a good-size yacht and cruise around the Gulf of Mexico searching for pirate treasure. Bobby was more practical from beginning to end. He was for taking it out to one of the popular swimming places—Rock Spring, Sanlando Springs, Palm Springs—and charging a quarter a head to use it for, say, fifteen minutes. By the end of summer we wouldn’t be rich, not by a long shot, but still our pants pockets ought to be bulging heavy sacks of quarters. Chris, the Greek, had another idea completely. He said he just wanted to learn how to use it and to enjoy it. He would have liked, he had to admit, to go over to Tarpon Springs where most of the Greeks in the state live and become a sponge fisherman. But he had the grocery store waiting for him to finish high school, the bright rows of labeled cans, the stalls for fresh vegetables, the meat counter, the coat of sawdust on the floor, the flies and the hanging flypaper, the rich smells of the place all mingling together, and his father, a dark little man always smiling and rubbing his hands together and with one quick finger belling the music of his sales on the cash register.
All of us, then, were thinking of the diving helmet, not just as a means to something—money, adventure, pleasure—but as well as a means to escape from something. For instance, Bobby, the practical one, didn’t need money at all. He came from the richest family in town, the banker’s. After the disasters of the Depression my father thought it was the best joke in the world that his son should have the banker’s son for his best friend. Whenever I’d ask permission to spend the night there or eat supper at Bobby’s, he’d say, “Sure, by all means. Go on over there and really enjoy yourself. We might as well get something back from the bank.”
“Hush up, Hugh,” my mother would tell him. “Bobby is his friend. He doesn’t have to worry about all that.”
“I’m for friendship,” my father would reply. “Let friendship thrive. But I reserve the right to take the ironic view of the situation. If you please.” He never quite got over the hard times and the fact that he’d lost every cent of his savings, though he managed most of the time to maintain the “ironic view.” He had been in the real estate business. Now he was a full-time inventor and spent most of his time in the study with a bottle. Bootleg whiskey then, but “the real stuff” off a boat that came by night to the coast and unloaded its cargo to dark waiting low-slung high-powered cars; these sped lightless over the rutted back country roads they knew by heart. Actual delivery was performed by a Negro washerwoman with a huge bundle of rags and bottles wrapped in a sheet and balanced on her head—which might have seemed mysterious and suspicious since nobody on our block could afford a washerwoman anymore and the wives could be seen any Monday morning hanging their own clothes out on the line, but the Chief of Police lived right down the street on the same block and got his liquor the same way. Anyway, there Father would sit with his bottle and his drawings and papers and plans and schemes. Some of them: an airplane, not a helicopter, that could fly backwards if you wanted it to, chewing gum that really cleaned your teeth so you didn’t have to bother brushing them, a pill that turned fresh water into pure gasoline, a brand-new kind of coffee made out of acorns, a new kind of bulletproof glass. The funny thing is that a few years later when the War came along the latter made him a good deal of money. The Government used some part of his patented invention for the canopies and blisters of fighting airplanes. But meanwhile my mother taught school, my sister put off getting married (forever it turned out) to teach school too. And my brother dropped out of school and got a job with a shoe firm as a traveling salesman. No wonder then, when I recall it now, all my thoughts were of the Amazon River and searching for buried treasure.
With Chris, as I said, it was a different thing. His people were poor even before the Depression. His father had been an officer in the Greek Army; and when the Turks drove them out of Smyrna, he came to Florida and managed to open up a grocery store. He was a thin, dark little man with a clipped military mustache. Everyone said he had been a Greek aristocrat once. (Of course they say that about all the foreigners.) Now he and his wife and Chris, their only child, ran a grocery store. If it wasn’t very prosperous, it was all his, and one day Chris would have it. Chris had to work only on Saturdays during the school year. But during vacations and the summer he had to work every day. Like lots of boys whose parents were foreigners, Chris was at once ashamed and protective of them, proud and embarrassed at the same time.
Bobby had furnished the basic item, a worn-out hot-water heater. It had a square piece of glass near the top where the pipe had fitted on, and that would do fine for the air line. He also furnished a jigsaw and metal files to smooth it down with. I furnished a garden hose. Chris had a bicycle pump and some rubber insulation that they use for the windows of automobiles. That was just what we needed for rough edges that would touch the body. Between smoking and talking about what we were going to do with it we did some work on it and finished up just the week that school ended. Chris was in a big hurry because he’d have to go to work right after the last day of school. We cut the heater in half and then cut out the sides of the top half so that it would fit easily over the shoulders and leave the arms free, like a sleeveless, sideless vest, with solid metal fore and aft. We filed and smoothed the jagged edges and fitted the strips of rubber insulation along the edges so it wouldn’t cut. We rigged up a way to stuff one end of the garden hose into the hole on top and keep it there with a great blob of tightly wound friction tape on the inside. We stuffed the little hose of the bicycle pump inside the other end of the garden hose. I painted a skull and crossbones on the back of it. And there it was, a genuine diving helmet.
Now the question was, what were we really going to do with it? I was for starting immediately to explore the lake bottom for rowboats.
“It’s full of sunk boats.”
Bobby wanted to take it out and demonstrate it to the owners of one of the swimming places.
“If we make a deal right away, we’ll have it made all summer.”
Chris shook his head. “That’s all right for you all,” he said. “You can do what you want with it all summer long. But I want to have some fun with it first.”
“What kind of fun?”
“What I had in mind,” he said, “was doing something all three of us would always remember.”
“Like what?” Bobby, the skeptic, said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Chris said. “Something special, something a little bit risky maybe.”
“Daring?” I perked up.
Bobby grinned in his superior knowing way and didn’t say anything. He lit a cigarette like a gangster in the movies and blew a series of neat concentric smoke rings. After all, he’d been smoking a lot longer than we had. Anyway
, they were his cigarettes.
“It’s just this,” Chris went on. “I know you guys have all kinds of plans for using the helmet. But I kind of thought that since we had talked about it so much and worked on it all together and all that, maybe we ought to do something special, just the three of us. We ought to make an occasion out of diving the first time, a kind of a ceremony.”
“A ceremony?” Bobby scoffed.
I was Bobby’s best friend, but I wasn’t on his side now.
“We got to have a test anyway,” I said. “We got to test the equipment and ourselves. They always do that.”
“You can test it in a bathtub.”
“Aw, Bobby,” I said. “Let’s do it right.”
“Why is it so important to you, Chris?”
Chris shrugged his shoulders just like his father did. Chris talked with exactly the same accent we did and used the same words and might just as well have been born in Florida like the rest of us, except every once in a while he relaxed into some wholly alien gesture, something he did with his hands, a sudden facial expression, or that shrug.
“My people have always been great divers,” he said.
That seemed to satisfy Bobby as a good enough reason.
“What did you have in mind?”
“Well, I was thinking maybe we might take a boat and the helmet out to Weikiwa. Maybe we could even get down inside that cave.”
“Too dangerous.”
Chris shrugged. I was delighted.
“I agree with Chris,” I said. “Let’s take it to Weikiwa.”
“I’m against it,” Bobby said, “but this is a democratic country.”
We decided to go out there on Friday, the day of graduation. We weren’t graduating, so we decided to skip that occasion—everybody dressed in white, long-winded speeches about the road of life, prayers made up on the spur of the moment that might last for half an hour, “Pomp and Circumstance” played badly by the Cherokee High School Band, and a whole lot of people (mostly girls) crying and carrying on. Bobby not only had a learner’s license, he had his own car as well, a beat-up one, but it ran. We met at his house early that morning, shucked our white clothes in favor of something more practical, packed all the diving gear in the backseat and strapped Bobby’s little rowboat to the top of the car. I brought a bottle of my father’s scotch. (He’d never be able to remember whether he drank it or not.) Chris had some bread and mustard and cheese and baloney from the grocery store. It was turning out fine. We got in the car and drove ten miles out into the heart of the woods to Weikiwa Springs.
Weikiwa was once, years and years before, a fashionable swimming place. There is the ghost of a great bathhouse in the woods there, a haunted, crumbling place, a sagging pavilion, a summerhouse where the ladies could sit and watch the swimming. There’s even a band shell where, I’m told, once on nice summer evenings music was played. The spring itself is a deep hole, a steep drop of ground going down to an almost perfect circle of water, an eye of clear sulfur water bubbling out of the mouth of an underwater cave. The spring is the source of a stream that winds away through a dense green jungle of palms and palmettos and water oaks and cypress, the trees covered with vines and the stream choked with green hyacinth plants. Farther along, up the stream a few miles, are some hunting camps, and if you go by boat to one of them, you’ll see alligators and some of the biggest water moccasins you ever laid eyes on. Or imagined. You might as well be in Darkest Africa; it’s easy to pretend you are. Weikiwa Springs is a lonesome, beautiful, abandoned place. I thought it was a stroke of genius for Chris to suggest testing the helmet there.
We got as near to the edge as we could with the car, and then we unlashed the boat and struggled with it down the steep overgrown slick bank to the fringe of sandy beach around the spring. We were sweating and panting by the time we got the diving gear down there too. I produced the bottle of scotch and opened it up.
“What’d you bring that for?” Bobby said.
“You have to break a bottle or something, don’t you?”
“What does it taste like?” Chris said.
“It’s not so bad,” I said. “It’s like cough medicine at first, but it feels warm once you get it down.”
“We might need it,” Chris said. “That water looks cold.”
So we all took long brave swallows, made faces, grinned, and felt pretty good about the occasion. Chris made some sandwiches, and Bobby offered cigarettes. We sat on the sand and drank and smoked and ate. We started feeling good and laughing about the whole thing. Even Bobby.
“Just think,” he said. “Here we are drinking whiskey, and all those kids in white suits are singing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ or Jesus Loves Me.’ ”
“What’s wrong with Jesus Loves Me’?” Chris said. He always wore a little gold cross around his neck.
“Nothing, I guess,” Bobby said. “But this is a whole lot better.”
We could all agree with that.
After a while Bobby put out his cigarette in the sand and stood up.
“Well, let’s get going,” he said.
But who was to go first? We drew straws for it. Bobby got first, I drew second, and Chris got the last turn. He looked sad, but when Bobby offered to trade with him, he said no.
“We got to do it the way the straws fell,” he said.
We loaded the gear in the boat and put on our suits and paddled out to the middle of the spring. We looked down and you could see all the way to the bottom. The water sparkled with June sunlight. We could see the sun shining into the mouth of the cave like a beam of light coming through the window of a church.
“Okay,” Bobby said. “Here we go.”
He slipped over the side and winced because the water was so cold. He looked very serious. He nodded his head that he was ready and held on to the boat with both hands while we slipped the diving helmet on him. Then he made a motion with his hand to start pumping and Chris grabbed the bicycle pump and began. Bobby waved a hand at us and slowly sank down into the lucent water. Chris kept pumping and I crouched over the side and watched him descending to the bottom. When he got there he walked along slowly, heavily, on his feet like a figure in a slow-motion movie. It was beautiful to see him way down there, walking along in pure brightness. But he didn’t stay down long. He moved around awhile on the bottom, then he took off the helmet and swam to the surface. We hauled the helmet up by the hose while he hung on to the boat.
“You got to pump more air than that,” was the first thing he said. “That bicycle pump doesn’t do much good.”
After we got the helmet in the boat he climbed in and sat there shivering, drying off in the sun.
“Another thing,” he went on. “We did this whole thing without planning at all. We ought to have signals. And we ought to go up to the car and get the rope and use it for a lifeline.”
We weren’t about to go back to the car and get a rope before we had our turns. We did agree on some signals, though: one jerk on the hose meant to pay out more, two jerks to pump harder, three that you were ready to come up.
“How did it feel?” I said.
“Not so bad,” he said. “You can’t move around very much and the pressure hurts your ears.”
“Do you think we can get in the cave?” Chris said.
“I doubt it. Not without some extra weight of some kind.”
We weren’t going to the car for a rope, but we didn’t mind paddling back to the bank to scout around for some good-size rocks to weight us down.
Now it was my turn. I slipped into the water and had to holler it was so cold. My voice echoed in the still woods around us. They put the helmet over my head. It felt heavy and wet. The faceplate made all the world look watery and blurred. I took a big rock in each hand and started to sink down. I was a while getting my feet on the bottom. It was a long slow graceful fall like falling in a dream. I could hear the squish, sqush, squish, sqush of the bicycle pump, and the air filled up the helmet and bubbled out under my arms and sh
oulders. The white sand on the bottom was soft under my feet. I looked straight up and there the boat hovered above me on the surface like some kind of flying thing. The water was so clear it seemed of no more substance than the heat waves that dance on summer highways. I set down my rocks for a second and gave one jerk for them to pay out more hose, then I picked up the rocks again and started, like a creature made out of lead, toward the mouth of the cave.
The water boiled out of the cave and my ears were ringing from the pressure. I fought it and managed to slip inside a bit, enough so that the mouth of the cave was behind me. Inside the cave was dark and slippery, but a flow of sun streamed past me and lit up some places with a soft glow. I could see that the cave went back a ways, and then it was too dark to tell what happened. My head was full of rushing noises. I had to keep fighting all the time to keep from being pushed right back out of the cave. The air from the pump seemed very scarce and thin. I knew I couldn’t get any farther, so I quit crawling and fighting and let the water wash me backwards out of the cave. When I was back on the bottom again and able to stand I signaled them to pump harder. I took a deep breath and shed the helmet and shot up to the surface. For a minute I just floated on my back and stared into the vague blue heart of the sky, dazzled by the hard light.
“How was it in there?” Chris yelled.
“Great,” I said. “I got in the cave, but I didn’t have enough weight to go anywhere. It was great.”
“Come on,” Bobby said to Chris. “Give me a hand with this helmet.”
I swam to the boat and waited alongside while they hauled the helmet in.
Chris was smiling now. He had a plan. We paddled over near the entrance of the cave and threw in all the rocks we had collected. They splashed and seemed to float end over end to the bottom. He was going to have as much weight as he needed to keep him down.
“In a way I’m glad I got to be last,” he said. “You guys tested it. Now I’m going to do something with it.”
He dropped lightly over the side without splashing much or rocking the boat and held on. He had a big white smile and the gold cross around his neck glinted in the sun. For the first time I noticed how dark-skinned he was.
Evening Performance Page 18
