by Robert Stone
“You can ask anybody around, Freddy, and they’ll tell you we’re the most professional, the most reliable vessel in the commerce. That’s always been true.”
“It’s been true in the past, Jack.”
“If we weren’t good, Naftali wouldn’t work with us.”
Negus looked down at the tabletop.
“I’ll tell you—sometimes I’m surprised he still does.”
“Well,” Callahan said, “you give me pause, Freddy.”
“I’m sorry, skipper, but there it is. Sometimes it feels like we’re just floating a party.”
“We do like we’ve always done, Fred. The only difference is we seem to be losing our confidence.”
Negus was silent.
Callahan reached across the table for the bottle and poured some rum into his soda.
“Maybe you’re right about getting old for it. Could be it’s the beach for you, old stick. Maybe you should get back to that saloon in Hope Town.”
“I just hope to see it again,” Negus said.
“Nowadays,” Tino told them, “so many droguistas. A mon get killed quick.”
“Young Pablo reminds me of a droguista,” Negus said after a while. “That’s what bothers me about him.”
“He’s a Coast Guard deserter,” Callahan said. “Hasn’t been around long enough.”
“Know who he reminds me of,” Negus said. “That dude we had the trouble with … you know. Can’t even remember his damn name.”
Deedee put her magazine aside.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “What an unpleasant thought.”
“Dat was bad,” Tino said.
Negus nodded in somber agreement.
“Well,” Callahan said, “we dealt with it. I trust we won’t have to do that to anybody again. However,” he said, “should the occasion arise … we won’t be found lacking in resolve.”
Freddy Negus stood up and walked to the hatch that led up to the galley.
“It ain’t a matter of Pablo, Jack. It’s the whole thing. I mean, Tecan’s no milk run. Those Tecs lay hands on us, we’ve had the fucking drill.” He leaned in the hatchway for a moment and went back to his chair. “El Jefe’s got a lot of new technology. He’s got more boats and they’re faster. He’s got helicopters. The Yanks give him whatever he wants. They tell him what he wants.”
“We’ve always run the same risks, Fred.”
“Damnit,” Negus said, “we were younger. We were tougher and more squared away. And you were … more responsible.”
“Obviously,” Callahan said, “if you don’t have faith in me we can’t operate.”
“Fred’s been brooding,” Deedee said. “He’s been thinking about that albino dwarf El Jefe keeps.”
Callahan sipped his drink.
“Oh,” he said with a smile, “the one who chews people’s privates off.”
Negus flushed.
“There is such a creature, Jack, I hate to tell you.”
“Snowflake,” Tino told them. “Copo. Das his name.”
“Tecan is a mixture of the old and the new,” Deedee said.
“Look,” Negus said, “there are times when the two of you act stark crazy. Now we gonna keep this damn boat right end up and do our business or what?”
“I’ll come through for you, Fred. You do the same for me. Are you guys with us or not?”
Tino nodded silently.
“Of course I’m with you,” Negus said. “Always have been. Just I get the feeling sometimes you’re flirting with disaster.”
Callahan grinned with adolescent mischief and winked at his wife.
“If it be now, ’tis not to come,” he declared. “If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.”
“Ripeness,” Deedee Callahan said.
“It’s readiness, Dee.”
“I mean taking a risk is one thing,” Negus told them. “Fucking around for kicks is another.”
“I like ripeness better,” Deedee said.
“You like it,” Callahan said, “because it’s sexier.”
With the air tank tucked into the gunwales under the bench on which he sat, Holliwell smoked and watched the green coastline—palm groves, banana plants strayed from the plantations, beach heliotrope of outsized luxuriance. Sandy, the dive master, ran his thirty-six-footer at full throttle, slapping the hull over the placid water; the bow took spray over the windward side that soaked the STP jacket Holliwell had worn against the sun.
Sandy was a long, spare man with a freckled English countryman’s face darkened by the suns of Tecan and West Africa. He lounged in the stern, one loose hand over the stick, one elbow on the rail, leaning out to see the water ahead. His long black hair was bleached at the crown, parted at the middle of his skull like a nineteenth-century Russian peasant’s, and this with his sharp black eyes deep-set under thick low brows brought a kind of dervish flair, a Rasputin intensity, to his appearance.
In the boat with Holliwell was a family of five Cuban-Americans from Miami. The father was stocky and muscular, his hair worn in a brush cut, his jaw jowled and pitted from relentless shaving. His wife was buxom and fleshy-faced yet with a long-legged trim frame, a Floridian body honed by dieting and Gloria Stevens. There were three boys between twelve and seventeen—the oldest vulpine with a nearly complete moustache and muscular like his father, the two younger quite like their mother; over the waist of each of their bathing suits sagged a tube of buttery fat. The parents spoke to each other in Spanish, the boys in American Adolescent. All of them ignored Holliwell.
“Could be seein’ turtle over this reef,” Sandy told the boys. “Good place to see dem.”
“Aw-right,” said the middle boy with enthusiasm.
“Would they bite you?” asked the smallest boy.
Sandy laughed. “Turtle bite you? Turtle don’t bite you. Maybe take you for a ride.”
“Hey,” the seventeen-year-old said, “I could go for that.”
When the children’s parents spoke to Sandy it was in a formal and imperious way, as though they were used to service. Sandy answered them with deference.
Three hundred yards offshore, Sandy killed his engine and hopped forward to put the anchor line down. Everyone looked over the side. The sky’s light sparkled back at them, reflected and refracted from the reef tops below—a long line of peaks curving out toward open ocean.
Sandy gave them the dive plan. The current was southerly. They would dive straight out from the stern, up-current. Then they could follow a semicircle of reef tops, cross a sandy bottom and follow the edge of a drop back to the boat with the current behind them. There was black coral there, Sandy told them. The site was called Twixt by the people of the coast.
Holliwell stared down at the liquid light of the white reefs. They were, after all, what he had come to see. He took a deep breath and put on his buoyancy compensator, his backpack tank, and bent to wrestle on his weight belt. Sandy put his own tank on with the ease of a man donning a sweater. The Cuban-American bustled about, trying stays and buckles—the head of the house overseeing procedure. The woman and the youngest boy were not going down. While Holliwell put his boots and fins on, Sandy checked out the gear of the younger of the two boys who were diving.
“Ever see any sharks around here?” the younger boy asked, as casually as he could. Holliwell admired his sangfroid. Testing his own regulator, he turned to watch Sandy answer.
“No sharks here,” Sandy said simply.
It turned out that the younger boy was diving with Sandy, the oldest with his father. It had been so ordered.
“Want to come with us?” the dive master asked Holliwell.
“I’ll just follow along,” Holliwell said. “I’ll be all right.” He was not in fact a very experienced diver but the dive seemed easy enough.
Holliwell went over last, carrying two five-pound weights, wearing trunks and a tee shirt to ease the shoulder straps on his sunburned back. On the jump-off, his mask fill
ed almost to eye level; he let the water rise in it, pinching his nostrils to equalize pressure. When he saw the reef tips rising around him, he cleared his mask and checked the depth gauge on his wrist. He was forty-five feet below the surface. He settled over a punch-bowl depression on the bottom; his fin tips stirred the milk-white sand there. The visibility at this depth was marvelous—over a hundred feet, perhaps two hundred. Black and golden angelfish swarmed around him as though they expected to be fed. There were parrot fish and convict tangs in uncountable numbers. The reef descended in terraces from its highest peaks, from each terrace elkhorn coral stretched in tortured fantastical shapes between the domes of brain coral. Below him wrasse and groupers glided by, a boxfish watched him shyly from behind two prongs of elkhorn. When he paddled out from the plateau on which he had rested, two trumpet fish came along with him like scouts. He swam clear of the next terrace and let the weights take him deeper; on the edge of vision he saw a barracuda—fairly small, certainly under three feet—prowling the edge of the swarm to pick off stragglers. When he leveled off, he was at sixty feet and the ocean floor still sloped downward under his fins. Far off and about forty feet above him he saw Sandy and the Cuban boy outlined against the shimmering curtain of the surface, swimming away from him.
On the next terrace he saw the black coral. There seemed to be acres of it, dappled with encrusting yellow infant sponges, and circling down he felt as though he were flying over a lava field grown with daisies. When he was closer, he could see the coral’s root and branch patterns. It was sublime, he thought. He could feel his heart beating faster; his blood coursed through him like a drug. The icy, fragile beauty was beyond the competency of any man’s hand, even beyond man’s imagining. Yet it seemed to him its perfection provoked a recognition. The recognition of what? he wondered. A thing lost or forgotten. He followed the slope of the coral field. Down.
It had been years since he had taken so much pleasure in the living world.
At about ninety feet, he confronted the drop. The last coral terrace fell away and beyond it there was nothing, an immensity of shadowy blue, an abyss. He was losing color now. The coral on the canyon wall read blue-gray as he descended; the wrasse, the butterflies, the parrot fish looked as dun as mackerel. A gray lobster scurried along the cliff. Enormous gray groupers approached to have a look at him. In a coral crevice, a spotted moray drew back at his approach, then put its head out to watch his bubble trail with flat venomous eyes. The surface became a mirage, a distant notion.
He was at a hundred and ten and his pressure gauge, which had pointed twenty-five hundred p.s.i. at the jump-off, now read slightly under eight hundred. It was all right, he thought, the tank had no reserve and no J valve; he would have enough to climb back as the pressure evened out. At a hundred and twenty, his exhilaration was still with him and he was unable to suppress the impulse to turn a somersault. He was at the borders of narcosis. It was time to start up. As soon as he began to climb, he saw shimmers of reflected light flashing below his feet. In a moment, the flashes were everywhere—above and below. Blue glitters, lightning quick. The bodies of fish in flight. He began pumping a bit, climbing faster, but by the book, not outstripping his own bubble trail.
Some fifty feet away, he caught clear sight of a school of bonito racing toward the shallows over the reef. Wherever he looked, he saw what appeared to be a shower of blue-gray arrows. And then it was as if the ocean itself had begun to tremble. The angels and wrasse, the parrots and tangs which had been passing lazily around him suddenly hung in place, without forward motion, quivering like mobile sculpture. Turning full circle, he saw the same shudder pass over all the living things around him—a terror had struck the sea, an invisible shadow, a silence within a silence. On the edge of vision, he saw a school of redfish whirl left, then right, sound, then reverse, a red and white catherine wheel against the deep blue. It was a sight as mesmerizing as the wheeling of starlings over a spring pasture. Around him the fish held their places, fluttering, coiled for flight.
Then Holliwell thought: It’s out there. Fear overcame him; a chemical taste, a cold stone on the heart.
He started up too fast, struggling to check his own panic. Follow the bubbles. Follow the bouncing ball.
As he pedaled up the wall, he was acutely aware of being the only creature on the reef that moved with purpose. The thing out there must be feeling him, he thought, sensing the lateral vibrations of his climb, its dim primal brain registering disorder in his motion and making the calculation. Fear. Prey.
He was running out of air—overbreathing and overtaxing the expanding contents of his tank. The sound of his own desperate respirations furthered panic.
When he had worked out a breathing pattern and reached the first terrace, he found that he had enough to curve his ascent with the slope of the coral. At forty feet, he saw a sandy punch bowl like the one in which he had stopped but the forests of elkhorn were everywhere the same and the anchor line was nowhere in sight. Looking up, he saw Sandy outlined against the surface, coming down at him.
Sandy grabbed Holliwell’s pressure gauge, read it and shook his head in reproach. He pointed to the right and upward along the slope. Holliwell followed the coral ridges as long as he could. The fish in the shallows swam placidly, unperturbed. When he found himself sucking hard on the regulator mouthpiece, he eased up the next thirty feet, taking three breaths on the way. And there, in another dimension altogether, the boat rocked gently, the youngest of the Cuban boys leaned over the side to watch the shifting surface, lost in reverie; his mother thumbed through Cosmopolitan. The shoreline glowed green beyond the hot blur of the beach, the line of banana jungle broken only by a white wooden building on a solitary hill, surmounted with a cross. Holliwell turned over on his back and swam to the boat’s ladder.
The boy and his mother watched as he took off his gear. Before disconnecting the regulator from the tank he checked the gauge once more; it read just a hair over empty at sea level.
“That’s as empty as it gets,” he told the people in the boat. The charge of primary process he had experienced at a hundred and ten feet put him in danger of becoming garrulous.
The boy looked at the gauge. “None left at all?”
“Empty,” Holliwell said. “Just like it says.” He was ill at ease with the boy and he sensed a certain artificiality in his own manner. His own children had not been this age for five years or more; he had forgotten what it was like. Out of touch again, he thought.
“How come is that?” the woman asked.
“Just ran it out,” Holliwell told her cheerfully.
“What did you see?” the boy asked him.
“Lots of great fish,” he said. “And beautiful black coral.”
“And we can’t take any,” the woman said. “Such a shame because it’s so beautiful.”
“I’m sure it looks prettier where it is,” Holliwell heard himself say pompously.
The woman inflated her cheeks and shrugged. She was not a bad sort, Holliwell decided. They chatted for a few minutes. The family’s name was Paz; they lived in Miami, had lived there since 1961. All of their sons were born there. The man was a dentist, she herself was in real estate. They were visiting her brother, who had five hardware stores in Tecan. Holliwell told her that he was a professor; she had lived in the States long enough to remain unimpressed.
Sandy and the middle son were next up; the boy climbed aboard and fixed a smirk on Holliwell. The dive master got out of harness in a single easy motion.
“Now what you want down theah, mistuh?” he asked Holliwell. He was smiling. “I nevah tol’ you go down theah.”
“Just wanted a look, I guess.”
“Sandy made him get out of the water,” the middle son announced. Señora Paz and the youngest boy gave Holliwell dutifully accusatory looks. Then Señora Paz asked sharply after her husband and eldest son. They were under the boat, Sandy assured her, playing among the elkhorn coral.
After a few minutes, the dentis
t surfaced and climbed aboard. He was elated after his dive and his amiability extended even to Holliwell.
“Where the hell were you?” Dr. Paz asked Holliwell. “I never even saw you.” His English was almost completely unaccented.
“Sandy made him get out of the water,” the middle son said.
“Just down too deep,” Sandy said soothingly. “A bit too deep and de air run out faster.”
“What’s the attraction down there?” the dentist asked.
“Just the drop,” Holliwell said.
“How far you think she drop off dere?” Sandy asked him, laughing.
“A long way,” Holliwell said.
“Nine hundred meters,” Sandy said.
“Is that possible?” Holliwell said.
Sandy let his smile fade. His nod was solemn, his eyes humorous with certainty.
“I’m tellin’ you, mon. Nine hundred meters.”
When the youngest boy wanted to know how far that was in feet, Sandy was uncertain.
“It’s about two thirds of a mile,” the dentist said. “I thought they taught you that in school.”
“Yeah, dummy,” the middle son said to his brother.
“How about that,” Holliwell said.
Then the oldest boy surfaced with an empty tank.
“Orca, orca,” the two younger boys shouted. “Orca surfaces at last.”
The youth’s eyes were shining as he climbed up the ladder. It was hard to dislike anyone, Holliwell thought, when you watched them come up from a dive.
“Gosh,” the boy said to Holliwell, “we didn’t see you anywhere.”
“Sandy made him get …”
Señora Paz hushed her middle son with a frown and a raising of her chin.
They motored back to the hotel dock making small talk. At the dive shack, Sandy, who knew a big tipper when he saw one, helped the Pazes wash and stow their gear and was jolly with the boys. Holliwell put his own gear away and sat down on the dock. After a while Sandy wandered down and joined him.
