by Lewis Shiner
“Dr. Lang,” I said, shaking his hand.
“That’s okay. You can call me Dr. Steve.” I couldn’t tell if he meant it as a joke.
“And this,” Tom said, turning to the girl I assumed was Lang’s daughter, “is—”
“His companion,” the girl said. She looks like a Playboy centerfold, if they took overdeveloped sixteen-year-olds. Her breasts bulged out of the top of a green-and-pink neoprene bikini, and the mousse on her hair looked like it had melted in the intense sunlight. “Allyson. With a Y.”
“Y?” I said.
“Why not?” She laughed like a kid.
Was the old man really screwing this nymphet while everybody stood around and winked? I couldn’t gauge Lori’s reaction because of her sunglasses.
“Interesting,” Lang said to Tom. “Why did you choose to introduce me in that particular way?”
“Cut it out,” Tom said.
“The first thing you mention, even before you introduce Allyson, you tell him I’m a psychiatrist. Are you trying to protect him, or…”
“I would try to ignore Dr. Steve’s sense of humor if you can,” Tom told me. “You want a beer?”
“Sure.” Hair of the dog time. My stomach was still somewhere out over the Gulf and the rest of me was parched and wilted. Tom ordered Bohemias and Lori held up her empty bottle of mineral water without looking at the waiter.
I tried to be companionable. “That stuff any good?”
She said, “I’m an alcoholic.”
“Oh.”
“I’ve been sober two years.” She looked at the bottle, which showed the Virgin in orange and blue robes. “It doesn’t taste like much of anything.”
Lang coughed and hawked up a big mouthful, which he spat at his feet. “Gross,” Allyson said, making a face. “I’m going to puke.” She is too young to qualify as remotely sexy, but that drunken lecherous ghost of Jim Morrison is still in there. Morrison must have had dozens, maybe hundreds of precocious little girls like her. He didn’t care about their ages any more than he cared about anything else.
The beer arrived. Just the smell made my headache worse. I stopped the waiter and asked for a mineral water like Lori’s. Okay, maybe I wanted a rise out of her. I didn’t get one.
Tom drank his beer in about three pulls and started on mine. “Waste not, want not,” he said.
I asked why they weren’t out diving.
“We went for a look at the La Ceiba drop-off this morning,” Tom said. “Got in enough bottom time for one day. The motto here is take it easy, don’t push pain. We’re spending the afternoon in serious pursuit of freeing up our nitrogen.” He drank some more and then he said, “Look, you must have a lot of questions.”
“Not really. I read Adkisson’s report. I talked to my mom. I don’t know what there is that anybody could tell me. I just want to see where it happened, maybe it can help me…I don’t know. Get my mind around it better.”
“My father died when I was a kid,” Tom said. “I’d seen dead people before and everything, but that was, I don’t know, personal somehow. It’s like death was suddenly real for the first time.”
“Yeah. It was like that for me too.” It wasn’t something I expected to hear from a total stranger. I felt naked and uncomfortably sober.
“You seeing anybody about this?” Dr. Steve asked. I shook my head and he shrugged. “You might think about it.”
Allyson said, “All you do is give people drugs.”
“A lot of depression is simply chemical imbalance.” He took another drink of his margarita.
Tom said, “It was a regular drift dive, out on Palancar reef. We’re going out there tomorrow, if you want to see it. You are certified, right?”
“I’ve got a Y Advanced Diver card. I haven’t used it since I was down here on my honeymoon, actually. It’s been ten years.”
“That’s okay. I’ll check you out in the morning.” There was an awkward silence, then he said, “Do you want to talk about it? I mean, I was there.”
“Tell me,” I said.
Tom hesitated, like maybe he shouldn’t have started. Then he said, “I was already headed up. We were all of us out of air. He and Adkisson were waiting for the boat to circle back, just sitting around on the bottom at thirty feet, burning up the last of their air. There’s a wall there that goes straight down forever. All of a sudden your father just takes off, over the drop-off. He didn’t look confused or panicked or anything like that. He was swimming fast, like maybe there was something he wanted to take a picture of. Adkisson went after him and that’s when I thought maybe something was wrong, so I started down too. It took Adkisson a long time to catch him. Finally he gets him by the ankle and turns him around. They give each other the okay sign and start up. By then I was totally out of air. I went up and yelled at Hector to get the boat over. By the time we got to your father he was dead.”
“His mask was full of vomit,” Lori said.
I already knew that my mother’s line about his getting to die while doing what he loved best was a lot of self-serving crap. But this was like a punch in the gut. I guess I was startled more than anything. I had no idea what she expected me to say.
“Lori, for Christ’s sake,” Tom said.
“When Tom gave him mouth-to-mouth, he got your father’s vomit all over his face.”
Dr. Steve said, “Why do you have this compulsive desire for ugly truths? Are you substituting that for your addiction to alcohol?”
Tom said, “Will you both just shut the fuck up?” He looked at me, tried an apologetic smile.
“I just wanted you to know that,” Lori said.
Tom acted like he hadn’t heard her. “Is your mother okay?”
“She’s holding up,” I said. I was still a little stunned, my mouth on autopilot. “She’s got a lot of friends. She’s been traveling, she spent Christmas with my wife and me.”
“She’s a really brave lady. I wish she hadn’t had to see it. To be on the boat when we, you know, pulled him in and everything. But she handled it and after that she just took over. Dealt with the police and funeral home and just handled it.”
“At least she was there,” I said.
He looked confused.
“If somebody dies in a hospital, it’s like they’re available, they’re there, you can try to get through to them, you can maybe clear up some unfinished business. With my father it was like some bull elephant, going off to the elephant graveyard all by himself, and to hell with everybody else.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Tom said. “Excuse me, I got to go siphon the python, I’ll be back in a sec.”
Dr. Steve said, “How long ago did he die?”
“Almost six months.” I hesitated, then I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Six months a week from tomorrow.”
“Yes, the grief process should be…Were you close?”
I started to say something diplomatic, but the truth came out instead. “No. I hated his guts, actually. I just never got to tell him that.”
Lori let out a one-syllable laugh, “Huh.” She took the sunglasses off and rubbed at the bridge of her nose, eyes closed. “Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t expect that.”
She looked up at me and I saw the whole of her face for the first time. Her eyes are dark blue, the color of deep water. All I wanted was to keep looking at her. I think I said the words in my mind: Don’t look away. Some kind of magnetic force came out through my eyes and connected her to me. I could see it register in her face, that she felt it too. I was sure I’d been staring at her too long, that everybody else at the table had to have noticed. I still couldn’t make myself stop.
Something moved in the distance behind her. It was Tom, walking toward us from the bathroom. When I looked at Lori again she had the sunglasses back in place. It didn’t matter. Everything had changed. Gravity pulled harder now from her side of the table. I knew exactly where she was, even when I looked the other way. I could hear alarms going off in my head and the word “troubl
e,” very distinct.
At six we went up the road to a seafood place. Pam and Richard were arm in arm, her hand on his ass. Maybe that’s all it takes, to be young and good-looking and not think too much. Dr. Steve was drunk, holding Allyson by the shoulder. Tom and Lori kept apart. He was loose in the way he walked, flushed from the beer. She had her head down, walking hard.
The restaurant is called Mariscos Típicos. It’s built out over a lagoon and you can see the water through the boards in the deck. The roof is thatched, there aren’t any walls, and all the tables have plastic tablecloths with thumbtacks around the edges.
We all ordered and listened to Tom complain about his business. Apparently the tourist dollars that come in can’t keep up with Mexican inflation. “What the fuck. I can always just cut my losses and get out. I’ve got the boat, I’ve got the dive gear, I’ve got a couple hundred bucks.”
“You’ve got me,” Lori said.
“Yeah. I got you, babe.”
Two waiters brought the food. One of them reached across Allyson to give Dr. Steve his steak. “Oh, gross,” she said. “Red meat. I’m going to puke. How can you eat all that blood?”
Tom said, “Don’t get Lori started. We’ll hear about the rain forest again.”
Allyson looked at Lori and said, “Are you a veggie?”
She said, “I eat fish sometimes.”
“But no cows,” Tom said. “Because cow farts are causing the greenhouse effect and the end of life as we know it.”
My snapper came in a thick sauce of tomatoes and onions, Veracruz style. One eye stared up at me. I remembered my father’s joke where at the end the halibut says, what’s the matter, buddy, don’t you eat across the street anymore? Our silverware clanged like picks and shovels in the tense silence.
I wondered what it would be like to change places with Richard. To get blasted and fuck my brains out all night, and have a body that could still go diving in the morning.
When I finished I put some dollars on the table and excused myself. Lori got up at the same time and said, “I’ll walk with you.”
I thought for a second she’d thawed. Once we were outside, though, she started down the highway in silence and I had to run to catch up to her. Eventually she said, “Women still can’t walk around alone after dark down here. I hate it, but what are you going to do?”
I said I didn’t know. That was the extent of it. She went in the back door of the dive shop. We each said good-night. For a second I saw their bedroom framed by the doorway, sagging bed with sheets rumpled in the middle, table lamp with a yellowed shade, a shelf of battered paperbacks.
I walked down to the lagoon, where a floodlight on the dock shines into the water. A dozen foot-long catfish swarmed in the shallows, eating insects drawn by the light. To my right I could see the lights of downtown; straight ahead, moonlit clouds scattered out to the horizon. Waves slapped the concrete at my feet.
As great as travel is, sooner or later you end up someplace. If your problem is loneliness and you end up there alone, you’re no better off than you were. I wondered what would have happened if I’d asked Elizabeth’s friend Francis to come with me. I thought about the way she’d kissed me on New Year’s and wondered if she might actually have done it, if once she got down here she might have let that tightly pulled-back hair come loose. The thought gave me my first serious hard-on in days.
I reminded myself that I was on vacation. Anything was possible. Adventure, romance, cosmic truth.
Except for waking up around five and lying there for an hour, I slept okay. I would have slept better with a couple or six beers in me. I’d thought about it before I turned in and it hadn’t seemed worth the trouble.
This business of waking up before dawn, though, has got to stop. It always happens when something is eating at me. When I was single and would get dumped by a girlfriend, I could count on it sure as clockwork, wide awake at five A.M., thinking about every shitty thing I’ve ever done.
So at five o’clock I woke up with the memory of this girl I’d gone out with freshman year at Vanderbilt, a blind date. We went to see Blow-Up on campus and then sat around the basement of her dorm and made out for two hours. She had short brown hair and she’d been a long time between dates. Her mouth tasted a little like Salisbury steak and she let me put both hands up under her bra. I never called her again.
I got back to sleep around six and got up in time to meet Tom on the dock for my checkout. He seemed embarrassed about making me go through with it and I think he was a bit hung over besides. That was when I realized I wasn’t. In fact I felt pretty decent.
It was only eight-thirty. I could feel the sun on my bare legs. I was half asleep and my body hadn’t warmed up yet. I put the regulator on the tank and checked the pressure. There had been so much dream stuff in the last six months, scuba tanks, bodies floating in the water facedown. I thought about Brian in his pool and it made me smile.
Tom crouched beside me, watching everything I did and talking to make it look more casual. I told him about the stereo business, that my wife taught grade school. For a second I had a crazy urge to confide in him. It was easy to see he and Lori had problems. He would understand about Elizabeth. It could be a guy kind of thing. Except it was too early in the morning; we would need darkness and a few beers to feel natural.
I was supposed to ditch my gear near a buoy in the lagoon, surface, then go down and put it all on again. I jumped off the edge of the dock, surprised as always that sea water is so salty, at the way it stings the eyes. I swam to the buoy using just my snorkel. The tank weighed a million pounds and it took forever. Then I put the regulator in my mouth and went under.
The water was cloudy with sewage and dirt and oil from the boat traffic. Even so it was clearer than anything in Texas. I blew a little air into my vest to get my buoyancy neutral and there it was. Weightlessness. Like a dream of flying, removed of all of Dr. Steve’s leering sexual connotations. It was enough to float there, to let the water touch me all over. A lone fish swam up to look me over. It was the size of my hand, colorless. It blinked at me and I blinked back. My bubbles made a ringing sound as they streamed out of the mouthpiece.
I followed the rusty chain from the buoy to the sandy bottom, ten feet down. Boat traffic had killed everything, left the entire bottom white except for the occasional red of a Coke can or brown of a beer bottle.
I ditched my gear and went up to wave at Tom. It took me two tries to get back, and in the end I had to use the chain to pull myself down. I hung there, upside down, one hand holding the air tank to keep from floating up, the other fumbling around for the regulator.
Eventually I got the tank turned on and the regulator started to bubble. I put it in my mouth and hung there, headfirst, breathing, waiting for my heart to slow down. Simple pleasures. Breathing. It’s easy to forget. After a while I put on the weights and the rest of the gear, blew out my mask and swam underwater to the dock.
When I handed Tom my fins and started up the ladder, he said, “You use the chain to get down the second time?”
I wondered if he expected me to lie. “Yeah.”
He nodded. “Kids under thirty never seem to think of that.”
Tom’s assistant is named Hector. He’s young and dark skinned and he wore mirrorshades and a belt buckle in the shape of a shark. He finished off a Kahlua and milk as we pulled out of the dock, and tried to start a conversation in halting English with Allyson. She blushed and giggled and seemed to think it was all very exciting. Dr. Steve was not amused. He kept his eye on the oversized diver’s knife strapped to Hector’s ankle.
We were out of sight of land and there was enough of a swell to move the boat around. Tom and I had the stern to ourselves. I said, “Is this where it happened?”
“No, it was a drift dive, like this one. Your dad…it happened at the end, when we picked everybody up.”
We put on our tanks and hit the water, which was just cool enough to feel good on my skin. When the bubbles arou
nd me cleared, my stomach lurched and the muscles in my legs started to crawl. The water was so clear my brain thought I was falling. The mountains and cliffs of coral below me looked purple because of the depth. Beyond them was a blue hole that seemed to go down forever. It was like looking down into the sky.
The current had split us up. The others looked like sky divers in slow motion. The sight of Pam and Richard fifty feet below me and a hundred yards downstream put everything into scale and made me feel tiny. I blew some air into my vest to slow my descent. Tom swam by and flashed me an OK sign. I gave it back and looked at my depth gauge. Fifty feet and counting. I figured Pam and Richard for ninety, at least. Their air wouldn’t last long at that depth. It was also pushing things if they’d had a decompression dive the day before. When the water is that clear and the reef is that deep it’s easy to lose track.
A school of stubby yellow fish changed direction in front of me, close enough that I could almost feel the hundreds of tiny fins brush my face. The current pulled us along the reef which rose to meet us. We drifted parallel to the drop-off, and along the edge I could now make out the real colors in the coral: red lacework, pale green fans, pink and electric-yellow sponges. They grew out of a base that looked like lava except that it too was alive, an aggregate of tiny animals.
Tom banged his tank with the handle of his knife and waved the others to close up ranks. The reef rose slowly toward the surface and leveled off at forty feet. The blue hole disappeared somewhere to my left. I had the rhythm of it now, my weight neutralized, arms at my sides, kicking just enough to stay level.
Tom waved me over and pointed to a patch of sand between coral heads. The top layer of sand suddenly came loose, sliding off the back of a spotted ray that was maybe three feet across. It banked in front of us and fluttered away. Despite Hector’s bragging, it was the closest any of us came to seeing a shark. In fact there weren’t many fish at all beyond a few chubby green parrot fish and an occasional school of yellow tang. My father had made a big macho thing about sharks, had even hit one in the nose with his camera once. I was just as glad we hadn’t run into any.
