The Deep

by Peter Benchley

  Gail moved closer to Sanders, taking the ampules from his hand as carefully as possible, setting them, one by one, in the canvas bag. It felt good to move around. The water inside her wet suit was warming to body temperature, and when she moved her arms or legs, pockets of water were squeezed from one part of the suit to another. She tried to count the ampules in the bag, but there were too many. She worried that if she kept adding more and more ampules, they might be crushed when she took them out of the water. Here they weighed almost nothing; out of water the liquid might be dense enough to cause the ampules on the bottom of the bag to crack. She tapped Sanders on the shoulder and pointed to Treece, a hazy gray figure only three or four feet away. Sanders tapped Treece, who raised the air lift off the sand. Gail kicked over to him and showed him the bag. He nodded and pointed upward.

  As she surfaced, the bag acted as a sea anchor, holding her back. She had to struggle to make way, kicking as hard as she could and using her hand to force herself upward. She looked down and saw Treece tap Sanders and beckon him toward the reef.

  Coffin had seen her bubbles, and he was waiting on the diving platform. He took the bag from her, and as he looked into it, his eyes glazed in recollection. All he said was “Aye.”

  Gail hauled herself onto the platform and lay on her stomach, panting.

  “Next time,” Coffin said, “leave your weights on the bottom. Makes it easier.”

  Gail said, “Yes,” and chided herself for not having thought of it.

  “I’ll have this bag emptied for you in a jiff; just want to stow the glass.”

  She pushed herself into a sitting position. “No rush.”

  Coffin walked forward, and Gail could hear a tinkling sound as he removed the ampules from the bag.

  “No trouble?” she called.

  “Not a peep. I don’t guess the bastard’ll try anything with all them folks on the beach. He’s a piece of work underwater, ain’t he?”

  “Treece? I suppose. Is the air lift hard to handle?”

  “For most men. It can buck like a goat. But Treece’ll hold it steady as a tree for five and six hours at a go. I think he’d stay down there all his life if he could. He’s been happiest down there, away from people, for a long time.” Coffin’s voice trailed off.

  “What do you mean, a long time?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Well, it ain’t my place to tell tales.”

  “Mr. Coffin,” Gail said, controlling her annoyance, “I’m not asking you to tell tales. But there’s something about Treece that everybody but us seems to know, and nobody will say. We’re living in the man’s house, sleeping in his bed. I think we have a right to know something.”

  Coffin picked the last of the ampules from the bag. “Maybe you do. All I’ll tell you is this: He was married.” He walked aft.

  “Where’s his wife?”

  “Dead.” He handed her the bag. “Two hundred and forty-six. Got a long way to go.”

  Gail looked at Coffin, debating whether to press him for more information. She decided not to try: If he wanted to talk, he would—when he chose to. Pressing might anger him. She lowered her mask over her face, bit down on her mouthpiece, and slipped off the diving platform into the water.

  Underwater, she rolled the bag into a ball to keep it from dragging. She looked down and saw Treece and Sanders working in the reef, several yards to the left of the cave. Through the cloud of sand that billowed above them she could not tell which man was which. She started down, and the water that seeped into her wet suit felt cold. She wondered how much air she had left, looking forward to the interlude that would come when she had to change tanks. The sun would feel good, and perhaps she could coax Coffin into sharing a few more facts about Treece’s wife.

  She swam through the floating sand and felt dusty motes cling to her hair. She heard a hammering sound, as though someone were working on an anvil. Blinded by the sand, she was suddenly rammed in the chest by a blast of air and pebbles; she had swum to within inches of the discharge from the air lift. She recoiled and let herself fall to the bottom. Debris rained around her as she crawled forward.

  Treece was banging the end of the air lift against the coral, trying to break off a piece so he could put his hand in a hole. A fist-size chunk of coral broke loose and rattled up the tube. Treece felt with his fingers, then shook his head: his hand was too large. He pointed to Sanders, who worked his fingers into the hole and withdrew them, clutching a green crusty piece of metal, which he passed to Treece.

  Gail tapped Treece, to let him know she was there. He turned and gestured for her to open the bag. She unfolded it, and he dropped the relic inside. Then he led them back toward the cave.

  Sand had drifted into the hole Treece had made, and now there was a barely perceptible dent in the bottom. Treece positioned the Sanderses as they had been before and touched the air gun to the sand.

  For the first six inches, as Treece redug the hole, there was nothing but sand. But soon he found the carpet of ampules, and Sanders plucked them, in twos and threes, from the shifting bottom and passed them to Gail.

  Lying prone on the bottom, moving nothing but her hands, Gail felt a deep, unpleasant chill. The water in her suit was still and clammy. Her body, needing to generate heat, sent a shiver into her arms, then her shoulders, then her neck. She hoped she would run out of air soon.

  Sanders picked the last two ampules from the hole. Treece backed up a foot or two, touched the gun to fresh sand, and, in half a minute, exposed countless new ampules.

  A lump appeared in the bottom of the hole, a hard cone. Sand slipped away from it until Sanders could see a metallic green peak. Suddenly he knew what it was: an artillery shell. He reached for it, and quickly Treece hit his hand with the air lift, then raised the air lift over his head and looked at Sanders. He held up the index finger of his left hand: Pay attention, he was saying. He pointed to the green cone and shook his finger, then pointed at himself: You stay clear; I’ll handle it. He pointed at Sanders, at the air lift, at the cone: Take this and train it on that thing. Sanders nodded and reached for the tube. There was a circular grip near the mouth. Treece kept his hand on the grip until Sanders seemed to have firm grasp, and then Treece let go.

  Watching Treece use the gun—his hand on the grip, the tube tucked snugly under his arm—Sanders had concluded that the air lift was a docile beast, so he held the grip loosely. The mouth of the tube drifted across the bottom, sucking up sand and stones. Suddenly the tube inhaled a stone it couldn’t pass, and, clogged, it jumped from Sanders’ hand and slammed into his armpit. Whipped by a hundred feet of hose full of compressed air, the tube bounced Sanders along the bottom like a Yo-Yo. Sanders wrapped his arms around the tube and tried to dig his heels into the sand, but the tube snapped him upward and swung him back and forth. He saw flashes of the surface and streaks of gray and brown as he was swept past the reef. He relaxed his hold, trying to free himself from the tube, and it cracked him across the ribs.

  Then the tube fell still. Gasping, peering through a swirl of sand and bubbles, Sanders saw Treece holding the bottom of the jumping air lift against the reef, banging it on a rock. He slammed it down again and again until, finally, the stone was disgorged. The tube swayed slowly in the tide.

  Treece made the “okay” sign and raised his eyebrows, questioning. Sanders touched his ribs and nodded. Treece gestured at the grip: Hold it steady, and it’ll behave. He led Sanders back to the hole.

  Gail touched his shoulder and looked worriedly into his eyes. He made the “okay” sign and dropped to his knees. Treece handed him the grip and fit the tube under his arm, Sanders held the grip so tightly that his knuckles whitened. When he was sure he was in control, he nodded at Treece and dipped the gun to the sand. It twitched and hummed against his body, but held firm.

  Treece swam to the other side of the hole, facing Sanders, guiding him around the green cone, directing that he dig the hole wide enough s
o that it wouldn’t collapse on itself.

  The shell was standing on end, and it widened—as sand was stripped from it—to a diameter of about six inches. It was coated with marine growths, but, judging by the way Treece was handling it, it was still very much alive.

  When the shell was almost free of sand, Treece wrapped his hands around its middle and gingerly lifted it from the bottom. He inspected it, then set it on the sand at the base of the reef. He took the air lift from Sanders and scoured the ragged hole for more ampules.

  The bag filled quickly. Gail was marrow-cold, longing for the sun’s warmth but unwilling to admit it to the men. She would force herself to wait the last few minutes until the bag was full enough. Then, to her delight, she felt the tightness of breath that signaled a nearly empty tank. She tapped Treece, ran her finger across her throat, and pointed to the surface, Treece gestured at the bag and raised his left hand, with two, then three, fingers extended—telling her to bring down more bags. She nodded. As she rose toward the surface, she saw that Treece and Sanders were staying at the hole instead of moving to the reef. They were going to dig as many ampules as they could, as fast as they could.

  Ten or fifteen feet above the bottom, the weight of the bag reminded her to drop her weight belt. She unsnapped the belt buckle and watched the twelve pounds of lead drop to the sand.

  Again Coffin was waiting for her at the surface. As she passed him the bag, she said, “There’s something in the bottom,”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. They found it on the reef.” Gail took off her tank and passed it to Coffin.

  “You want a fresh one?” Coffin asked.

  “Yes. He wants more bags.”

  “Shouldn’t wonder. If what’s supposed to be down there is down there, it’ll take a bleeding eon to get it up with one bag.”

  Gail pulled herself onto the diving platform and unzipped her wet-suit jacket. She leaned back against the stern of the boat, letting the sun warm her cold, wet skin. There were tender spots on her face, at the pressure points from the mask, and her mouth felt stretched and sore from the mouthpiece—as if a dentist had been working on a back tooth and hyperextended her lips. She wiped her nose and saw blood on her hand.

  “Tired?” Coffin said as he unloaded the ampules.

  “Exhausted.”

  “I’ll take a trip, then. There’s nothing going on up here.”

  “No, it’s all right,” she said, not sure why she was rejecting his offer. “I’ll take one more. If something does happen, better to have you here.”

  “At least we’ll rig up something to make it easier.”

  Gail rested for a few more minutes, then climbed into the boat and disconnected her regulator from the empty air tank. As she prepared a new tank, she tried to think of a subtle way to get Coffin talking about Treece’s wife. There was no subtle way, so finally she said, “What did Treece’s wife die of?”

  Coffin glanced at her, then concentrated on the bag. “I’m counting,” he said, dropping ampules into plastic sandwich bags. “There. Fifty.” He tied off the sandwich bag and started to fill another one.

  Gail was silent until she had finished working on her tank. Coffin dropped the last ampule in the plastic bag and tied it off.

  “Has she been dead long?”

  Coffin ignored her. “Two-ten,” he said. “That’s four fifty-six altogether.” He reached into the bottom of the canvas bag and removed the piece of green metal. “Hello.”

  “What is it?”

  “An escutcheon plate.” He held it up. The plate was shaped like a fleur-de-lis. In each of the leaves there was a keyhole. Around the edges were six holes where nails had been. “Covered the lock on a box or chest. What’s he want with that?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Coffin set the escutcheon plate on the shelf in front of the steering wheel. “It’s just brass.”

  Gail paused. “If you won’t tell me,” she said, “I’ll ask him.”

  Coffin opened a locker and took out two canvas bags and a coil of three-eighths-inch hemp. “That would be a cruel thing to do.” Coffin fed an end of the rope through the handles of one of the bags and tied a bowline. He paid out twenty or thirty yards of rope, cut it, and tied the cut end to a cleat on the stern. He repeated the procedure with the other bag, securing the rope to a cleat amidships.

  When he was finished, he stared at the knife for a moment, thinking. Then he stabbed it into the gunwale and turned to Gail. “All right. I don’t want you asking him. I don’t want you giving him pain. He’s had his fill of that.”

  Embarrassed, Gail started to say something, but Coffin cut her off.

  “When he was a lad, he raised his share of hell on Bermuda. No more than most boys, I guess, but his hell-raising seemed to have a direction, as if he was trying to say something. He never shoplifted or robbed anything from common folks. Everything he did was against authority—the police or the British. I remember, the British tried to confiscate some common land on St. David’s to build an installation of some kind. The Islanders got all hot about it, claiming the land was theirs by rights. ’Course, the British took it anyway, but they had the devil’s own time building anything. Treece and his cronies tore things down as fast as they were built, sugared the gas tanks of all the construction equipment, things like that.

  “Anyway, when he was about twenty-three, he met a British girl, Priscilla. I forget her last name. She was here on holiday, and she met Treece in St. David’s, pretty much by accident. Lordy, she was a gorgeous girl! And nice. A kinder, sweeter lass never drew breath. Treece taught her how to dive, how to look for wrecks—Christ, how to do everything but talk to fish. She taught him how to handle people, how to handle himself. Calmed him down like an oil slick on a wave. She went home to England but came back the next summer and took a job in Hamilton working with kids. A year after that, Treece and her got married—that must have been about 1958, thereabouts. The proper Brits on Bermuda didn’t take kindly to the marriage. They never did know what to make of St. David’s people. Sometimes they called ’em red niggers; most often they pretended St. David’s didn’t exist. But once Priscilla moved in with Treece on St. David’s—rather than the other way around, bringing him out into civilization where he could embarrass someone—they forgot about it. She kept her job in Hamilton, and he stayed on the island.

  “It was like Treece was all of a sudden a new person. There was no more anger in him, no room for it. There was too much happiness.

  “For two, maybe three years, everything was fine. They raised wrecks together. To keep the larder full, Treece did salvage work. His father was still alive then, so he didn’t have the job with the light. One spring in the early sixties, Treece found his first treasure wreck, the Trinidad. It didn’t yield much as treasures go—a gold bar, an emerald ring, a few other things—but it was enough to give him a fair poke. Right away, Priscilla got pregnant. Nobody knew it at the time; it didn’t come out till after. But they should’ve known: she had the glow of life about her. She wore that emerald ring so proud, and she was near bursting with love and . . . well, I guess goodness is about the only word.

  “Like I said, she worked with kids, troubled kids, the ones who hadn’t done enough to merit a stay in the brig but who couldn’t quite handle everything society said they should handle. She loved those kids like they was her own.

  “This was around the time the drug thing was just getting big in the States. Not here; it’s never amounted to much here. But there was talk about Bermuda being used as a halfway station for smugglers. A ship arriving in Florida or Norfolk with a European cargo raises eyebrows, especially if it’s stopped at, say, Haiti or the other islands on the way. But sailboats on a round trip from the States to Bermuda, or businessmen down here for long weekends—nobody paid them no mind.

  “One day, one of Priscilla’s kids got loose-lipped and spilled something about a schooner due from down south with a load of drugs. She thought it was just talk,
but she mentioned it to Treece. Treasure-divers are wired into everywhere, every bar and fish market. They have to be, to pick up clues: so-and-so saw a pile of egg-rock ballast here; somebody else spotted a strange timber there; ‘Hey, look at the coin I found off Spanish Rock.’ That kind of thing. So it wasn’t hard for Treece to check the rumor, and it was true. A private yacht was due into St. George’s with ten kilos of heroin. Part of it would be moved aboard a cruise ship in loaves of bread; the rest would be stowed here and taken up north little by little by ‘businessmen.’

  “In those days, Treece still had some trust in the government. Priscilla had taught him that all authority wasn’t necessarily out to get him. So they went to the government, right to the top, and told what they knew. Well, the government didn’t believe them, and, to be fair, there wasn’t much evidence for them to believe—fair, that is, considering that they were pigheaded about Treece from the start. They didn’t have any idea how much he knew. As far as they were concerned, this was all rumor started by a kid.

  “That got Treece pretty riled, partly out of pride. Here he had the bloody goods on some people’ smuggling heroin, and the government wouldn’t take his word. He decided to stop them himself and present the drugs to the government on a platter. He didn’t know what he was getting into, and he did a couple of foolish things, like tell one too many people what he was up to. He was threatened a few times, and that got him still hotter. Priscilla tried to calm him down, but it was hard ’cause she agreed with him.

  “Not to burden you with all the details, Treece and some chums met the yacht outside St. George’s harbor and tried to board her. There was a bloody great rumpus, and the yacht steamed away.”

  “With the drugs?” Gail asked.

  “Aye, but their plan was a wreck. Four days later, Priscilla was found dead at her desk in her office. The medical examiner said she had died of an overdose of drugs, and the case was closed. What people figure happened, one of the smugglers’ contacts here—his operation ruined—waited for her in her office one morning and, before anybody else got there, stuck a needle in her. There were track marks on her arms, but they were all fresh, put there to make it look like she was a user.