Rundown

by Michael Cadnum

  As we watched, Mr. Emmit’s face appeared. He was squirting Windex and clearing the panes with a fistful of paper towels.

  It was a little unusual, this two-person kitchen routine. My family either loads the washer or lets the dishes dry bare.

  “I hear Cass finally picked a photographer,” said Mrs. Emmit.

  “She chose one months ago,” I said. “But the man she wanted is on long-term assignment for National Geographic.” It figured that Cass had wanted a wildlife photographer to snap her wedding.

  “Oh my,” said Mrs. Emmit, ready to console. Marta marched by with the shears on a pole, the tool for reshaping the branches of tall trees.

  “The consultant recommended one,” I said. Cass had said she wouldn’t let ninety-nine percent of the photographers she reviewed take pictures of her autopsy. “Cass says he understands her vision.”

  “You have to learn,” said Mrs. Emmit. Mrs. Emmit remembered our birthdays and gave us each a present for Christmas, but sometimes I didn’t understand her.

  “To listen,” she added. “So you can give people what they want. Sometimes I’m sitting there with my colored pencils and my sketch pad, all ready to create a set design for a play, and the director doesn’t have a clue!”

  “Cass has a good idea she wants a garden wedding, with a string quartet and the sun shining.” Somewhere outside the shears snipped.

  “At least you don’t have to read Cass’s mind,” said Mrs. Emmit.

  I fished for the old-fashioned plug, a rubber stopper with a ring. I pulled the plug ring, and the sink gave a pleasant gurgle. I like to take a moment and rinse out the skein of suds clinging to the sink, splashing everything away.

  “A friend of mine wants to write an article about you,” said Mrs. Emmit, hesitation in her voice. “Ruthie Deerborn writes for one of those weekly newspapers everybody reads. Full of stories about interesting people.” Her voice rose upward, like a question, but not.

  My expression must have encouraged her.

  “She’s excited about the way you defended yourself,” she said. “When you hear about something like that, we all want to stand up and cheer.”

  It would have been easy for someone to look at me and think, She’s embarrassed, but pleased.

  “That would be all right, wouldn’t it?” said Mrs. Emmit. “Sharing what happened with the public?” She put her damp hand on mine. “We wouldn’t have to use your name, Jennifer. Only your friends would know.”

  I stretched my wet suit on the front yard gravel and examined the connectors, early morning low cloud burning off. Most divers don’t like to expose their suits and masks to any more full sun than they have to—it dries out vinyl.

  Marta joined me, two mad scientists with humanoid body parts. “Soon they walk the earth,” said Marta, sounding just like the German biology teacher at our school.

  I worked the purge button, to make sure the action was clear, and did what Mr. Emmit always recommended—blew through all connectors, just to make sure a spider or a moth hadn’t tucked himself in. It had been too long since I had been down, and I kept tightening and loosening my mask strap, making sure it fit.

  Chapter 21

  I always feel ridiculous just before I enter the water in that Halloween diving getup. Everything made a science-fiction noise, my feet squelching sand with each step.

  Marta made it look natural in her black-and-yellow gear, her eyes alert behind the lens of her mask. She waded into the sea, slipped her fins on, then ducked her head under the surface, taking that first, wonderful look below. Then she treaded water, took the mouthpiece from between her teeth, and said, “Take your time.”

  I wet the inside of my mask with a little water, cooling the inside of the lens so it wouldn’t mist up. I rubbed some spit inside the lens, too. I made a point of going slow, feeling nervous. This was unusual. I had always loved diving. But they talk about the premonition you have hours before a moray eel takes a chunk out of your shin.

  Marta lolled in the waves and then swept her arm around, rolling in one beautiful motion into the water. She resurfaced and churned along through the clots of seaweed, picture perfect, waiting for her diving buddy. The kelp is thick, and she made sure I carried a knife on my belt to slash my way free if I got tangled. It was a stainless steel weapon, with four round finger holes in the grip.

  I tested the knife for feel, thrusting, cutting the air. The Aqua Lung hung awkwardly on my back, like an artillery shell I just happened to have slung over my shoulder.

  Mr. Emmit had backed the van all the way to the overhang. He was strapping on his gear, ready to join us in a few minutes.

  The pier to my left carried a scattering of tourists out into the bay, while the boutiques and restaurants of Cannery Row glittered in the morning sun, parked cars and window washers, land folk going about their business. Seals jammed together at the end of the pier, a pile of brown sleeping bags.

  This is the most awkward time, when you are not one of the land people anymore, and not a water creature, either. I put my hand on my regulator valve, test twisted it for a second, and then put my hands to my head and pulled hard, stretched the mask strap, forcing the diving mask over my forehead, my eyes.

  The strap had a twist in it, and I worked it free with my finger, a lock of hair adhering to the rubber, sticking to it, tugging—it hurt. I freed my hair, and felt the dull curiosity of the tourists, and thought I could make out the quack-quack of commentary, my body shapeless under the black suit.

  Or not quite shapeless—you could tell I was female, and I felt vulnerable, trapped in my equipment. I envied Marta, who was already far out, slapping the water loudly every now and then, an unspoken Come on!

  I felt the subtle suction of the mask, smelled the latex and faint, salty zest of the interior of the mask as my heels kissed the water. We had taken our lessons in a University of California swimming pool in Strawberry Canyon, weeks of treading water, learning about ascent rates, how to avoid the bends.

  I tasted the sharp, almost bitter flavor of the mouthpiece, rolled over onto my tummy, and there was the glittering, grainy surface of the ocean floor, an arm’s length away, sand ripples and flecks of mica, and a quarter-moon of shell. I adjusted the regulator, and tasted the neutral everyday flavor of tanked air.

  I kicked my fins, and the bottom fell away—sharply away—and the tall, streaming ribbons of kelp reached upward.

  I was only a meter or two below the surface when a slow leak tongued my cheek, and a disc of glassy fluid jiggled and swayed in the interior of my mask.

  It’s the first thing you learn—how to clear a leak. I pressed my hand against the top of the mask and blew hard out of my nostrils. The leak was gone. Marta was a luminous sketch, the yellow of her wet suit glowing in the dark.

  A layer of cold water swept up to me, and the ice-chill flashed through my wet suit, all the way to my flesh. And the leak began again, insistent, a spreading puddle quaking just below my eyes.

  Chapter 22

  Starfish glowed, astonishing orange hands, hanging on to the boulders. Eye-catching colors, the glow of traffic cones and graffiti. I descended, forcing the leak from my mask with an effort, blowing hard through my nose.

  Marta was on her feet, doing a graceful shimmy to stay where she was, indicating with her hands a bushel of sea urchins. This shock of urchins resembled five hundred tiny porcupines, gray-green. She was telling me to be careful—the urchin needles could break at a touch and fester in our skin.

  I felt the impulse kneading my skull, massaging into me: Why ever leave this place?

  The surface high up there was molten glass, broken by the silhouette of a human crab kicking forward without effort, Mr. Emmit enjoying the view. Marta glided along the crustacean-encrusted floor, her hands bottle-green in the transformed sunlight.

  She was entering a kelp holdfast, and I followed.

  Marta parted the way ahead, the trunks of the seaweed lofting upward, a coliseum of garden hoses straining towa
rd the sky.

  Mr. Emmit hovered middle depth, pointing the beam of a flashlight among the trellises of seaweed, content with trolling the water, easy and in no hurry. The sound in my ears was the rasp and suck of my breath, the muted thunder as bubbles ballooned upward, and the water-deformed sounds that never make sense—murmuring surf, the brilliant chink as Marta brushed a stone.

  Something pushed me.

  A body shrugged into me, knocked me aside, a shopper in a hurry, no time to apologize. A svelte, muscular presence silked around me, arcing, circling, massive and lithe at the same time. I could not make out what it was. A fin tossed upward, blocking my view.

  Something in me wasn’t afraid. Some strange, foreign part of me was relieved.

  I crouched, pulling out from under the coursing body.

  I kicked hard, pumping water with my fins, and the surface approached, the roiling, glassy lava, day and sky. I told myself to keep breathing—there was danger of a gray-out. I broke the ceiling, ripped the breathing piece from my mouth, and sucked real air.

  The ocean burst beside me, and the sea-dragon shape of Marta joined me, wrenching at her mask.

  Her eyes blinked at the sudden noon light, the mask leaving an indentation on her cheeks, a curved line.

  “Something scared me,” I gasped.

  “I saw it,” she said.

  She didn’t want to embarrass me.

  “A seal, right?”

  “A big one, though,” she panted. “A really huge bull seal, with a definite bad attitude, I could tell.”

  A harbor seal—the mildest-tempered animal in existence. I stuffed the apparatus back into my mouth, cleared my mask with a snort, and surged downward again, looking for the killer beast.

  The animal had startled me. But that wasn’t what bothered me as I leg-beat my way down.

  A shadowy portion of me had felt relief at the sudden weight as it brushed me. A voice in me had whispered, unafraid, like a voice giving a weather report, So this is how it ends.

  I climbed downward as I tried to warn myself to go back, now.

  Chapter 23

  The seal was gone, trailing along the surface far away.

  Marta pulsed ahead, over a boulder bearded with fish, a school, tails up, swimming to stay in place, feeding on the green rock. A column of sunlight ascended from the sea floor.

  My hand was on the plastic sheath of the mini knife fastened to my belt. I could slip the stainless steel knife, brand-new, and cut the air tube, watch the gas gush and bubble, boiling upward. All it would take would be that one nick.

  I could stay here, taking deep breaths of cold water.

  Some hitch in my stroke made the quivering surface recede above me, lifting higher as I swam toward it. Oxygen poisoning, my brain overloading, not enough nitrogen in the air.

  You expect the surface to have a texture, roiling and smoothing. It looks like a silvery membrane. I broke it easily.

  I can tread water by the hour, no effort. But now my breath was ragged, the sunlight cheap-bright. I was closer to the pier than I expected, the cylindrical timbers hairy with sea muck, the barnacles glittering, sharp edged.

  The tide was dragging me slowly toward the columns of wood, the salt water seething, and I felt my arms and legs flail. I was strengthless, and I could not breathe.

  Air gushed behind me, Marta sputtering, her mouth piece gurgling air and water. She put a hand out to me, while with the other she wrenched at her mask.

  “A cramp?” she asked.

  I gave a quick nod, coughing water. Salt water is pungent, iodine and alum, hot pepper and bitter salt. The tide was pushing us into the pier timbers. The water was black, sank fast, seething. It chuffed upward again in a flash, boiling white.

  Marta took my arm, as though we were pretending: I’ll rescue you. But it was only half pretend. For all her strength, I could tell that Marta was afraid, too—of the dark simmering under the pier. And afraid of what she saw in my eyes, a panic you read about but never believe can really happen.

  Mr. Emmit grinned with the effort, pulling his webbed feet, slop, slop, out of the foam.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “We’re good,” I said, sounding as casual as possible, doing it well.

  “Jennifer got a cramp,” said Marta.

  Divers get cramps fairly often, from extending the long muscles of their legs in cold water. “It passed,” I said.

  Mr. Emmit dried his head with a faded green towel and tossed one over to Marta, the two of them scrubbing their heads until their hair stuck out all over. One of the problems with diving is the salt in your hair, thick glop that sticks every hair together.

  The knife was gone, my hand touching the empty sheath.

  Chapter 24

  Marta and I sat on the back steps, drinking hot chocolate, summer sunset finished.

  Along the coast in the summer evenings clouds glide across the sky, stay all night, and burn off by noon. You can feel the dark rise right up out of the ground.

  The hot chocolate tasted good, the heat of the hand-thrown, warty cups just what I needed. I had showered, using baby shampoo on my hair, and spent the afternoon watching the Emmits’ videotapes, Underwater Wonders of the Red Sea, Deep Water Diving off the Big Island.

  Marta slurped her chocolate pointedly, about to say something.

  “You panicked,” she said.

  I did not want to ask myself why I had pulled the knife.

  I spoke after a short silence. “I’ll pay for a new one.”

  “You panicked. Twice.” This was typical Marta, saying something and continuing to say it, hammering the point.

  I kept quiet.

  “I feel strange down there, too, sometimes,” she confided. “That’s why we go down. Because we don’t belong there.”

  “You do fine,” I said.

  She dismissed the compliment with a flick of her hand. “Some divers like that out-of-sync feeling. I met a guy who goes free diving, without tanked air. So he can feel ecstatic apnea.” She uttered the phrase with exaggeration, like she didn’t approve of it, and added, “When you almost die you supposedly feel great.”

  That’s all it had been, I thought. The diver’s equivalent to vertigo. It can happen to anyone.

  “What happened to you today makes me feel better,” she said. “You can fight off the Jogging Rapist, but you’re human.” The touch of envy in her voice surprised me.

  My mother told me that in listening to people you watch the way they hold their bodies, pay attention to their silences.

  “Mom wants me to take a course in martial arts,” Marta said at last. “There’s a class starting at the Y.”

  Marta folded her arms, imagining a struggle, I guessed, picturing it vividly in her mind. She said, “An attacker would fling me like a rag doll.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. I wondered what it would be like to tell Marta everything.

  “I could never hit a guy, one punch, and have him back off.”

  The envy in Marta’s voice was unmistakable now. She swung her fist, slow motion, like a boxer. I put my hand out, wrapped my fingers around her fist.

  When she spoke again, she said, “You should let Ruthie interview you, that friend of Mom’s. She’s wonderful.”

  My breath caught. There was something out there. Some animal at the edge of the dark back garden.

  “She raised three kids herself,” Marta continued, “working as an electrician. She redid all the circuit breakers at the theater. She took journalism classes at night, and now she publishes articles in magazines. She says she’d love to meet you.”

  I put a finger to my lips and pointed.

  The possum made his choice, running with a peculiar gait in our direction. He did not lope, like most four-legged animals, but ran side to side—right legs, left legs—locomoting into the dazzle of the porch light.

  He peered up at us, his eyes pink glass, his hairfree snout the color of white crayon, a little dirty.

  He
vanished under the house.

  Waking up a second morning isn’t as magical. Your body already knows it will be somewhere else by night. The sun is bright outside curtains that you can’t look through without thinking, Who knows when you’ll stand here again?

  “I scrambled some eggs,” said Mrs. Emmit, puckering her nose, not sure I was an egg person.

  My parents taught us to say good morning first thing and show enthusiasm for whatever the hostess plans for breakfast.

  The entire Emmit family leaned on things, elbows on tables, hips on doorjambs, in no hurry. They pulled curtains shut, made sure the packets of hot chocolate were sealed in Tupperware. Everything in the bungalow was second best, the couch saggy, the easy chair slumped with use.

  It’s nice but embarrassing to see a family going through its friendly paces, Marta pretending to talk through the floor to the possum. She used a little Minnie Mouse voice I had rarely heard before, telling him that all possums should be gone by next time.

  I could feel it in my sinews, the way my feet dragged, how badly I did not want to go home.

  Chapter 25

  We took a different route on our return. We skirted the canvas-green artichoke fields, following the two-lane Highway One, the Pacific pacing and snapping beyond the brown cliffs.

  The Emmits wanted to stop at the Pigeon Point lighthouse, but the lighthouse was closed. We got out anyway, walked across the ice plants, a variety of ground cover related to cactus. You break off a stub, and it oozes green. We stood watching the ocean, white gulls sprinkling the blue. The lighthouse was not in use as a navigational aid anymore, a sign said. It could be visited between hours which were covered over with a neat rectangle of paper.

  Fields along the coast grow flowers for florists, acres of green with color just starting, pastels and half-tones, the blossoms not open yet. As soon as they are about to flower they are gone, shipped to town in plastic tubs. Wooden stands with hand-painted signs offer cherries and strawberries, although the strawberries were gone, now, replaced by olala berries and blackberries, and artichokes, the green thistles Dad steams and eats with butter, or with a special mayonnaise he makes himself.