Pressure Drop

by Peter Abrahams

  Matthias swam in blackness. He thought: what if this tunnel diverges? what if it leads nowhere? what if I’m going down? There was no point in thinking like that. He stopped doing it. He thought of Nina instead: We bumped heads in the dark. He thought of the way she ate her ham and cheese sandwich, the way she had said, “I’m a relative,” to Dr. Robert, the way she had trembled in his arms outside 216 East Thirty-third Street. He was glad he had taken the chance of holding her then, but he wished he had more memories of her. Weren’t there more? He was trying to recall some when he became aware of light all around him. Light, not strong, but real and natural. How long had he been in the light?

  Or was he narced and imagining it? He checked his depth gauge and found he could read it clearly: 105 feet. That wasn’t bad. He couldn’t be narced at 105 feet. He swam on. He was in a tunnel and he wasn’t alone. He had sponges, pink and yellow for company. As he approached them, his air began to pull hard. Or had it been doing so for some time? He swam faster, but tried not to breathe faster. Each lungful came harder than the one before. Then they weren’t full lungfuls anymore. And then there was nothing. Out of air, like a stupid college kid in a Florida sink.

  Matthias held his breath and swam, watching his depth gauge at the same time, ready to exhale if he went up. Doing everything right. But why? Even if he got out and still had enough oxygen in his lungs to make a free ascent, he’d be bent to death.

  Matthias swam on, kicking as hard as he could: beyond the point where his lungs were bursting, beyond the point where the cough reflex operated. The depth gauge remained at 105. His heartbeat pounded in his ears, louder and louder. Blackness began closing in. Kick. Kick. And then he saw something on the tunnel floor, just ahead.

  A scuba tank.

  With regulator attached. He could read the decal: ZB-27; and the pressure gauge: 2900. Matthias stuck the regulator in his mouth, gasped out the carbon dioxide in his chest, sucked in air.

  Happy Standish’s air. He breathed it in and out, in and out. And he saw it all: Bernie Muller had poisoned two tanks on the compressor at Two-Head Cay, stuck on Zombie Bay logos, painted them with the numbers of the tanks Moxie had already filled for Happy and Felix, switched them and dropped the originals over the side with Felix’s suitcase. Matthias swam on with ZB-27 in his arms.

  The light grew brighter. It seemed to come through cracks in a wall not far ahead. Matthias swam to it. It was not a wall, but a thick growth of staghorn coral. There was a big gap at the top. Matthias swam through and out into the open sea, endless and full of light. He looked at the staghorn formation; it was the formation on the ledge at 100 feet that he had seen before. It grew taller than the mouth of the cave, hiding it completely, and was perfectly placed to catch things falling from above.

  Matthias rose to 50 feet with ZB-27 in his arms. Later, he rose to 40, then 30, 20, 10. He breathed Happy’s air down to 50 p.s.i.: enough for laboratory analysis. Matthias already knew the air was good—he’d be dead if it weren’t—but the court would want to know too. He still had time to file his appeal; almost a whole day.

  Matthias kicked to the surface, unbent, and saw the sun, just risen over Two-Head Cay in the east. The sea was rough. Matthias turned: he was in Zombie Bay, no more than three hundred yards from the dock. Bernie would no longer be waiting for him in the tunnel. He would be decompressing in the blue hole, or on his way up. Matthias stuck his snorkel in his mouth and started swimming as fast as he could.

  The stars faded away. Then the moon. The sky turned milky. The wind blew harder. Nina, Moxie and the boy stood by the blue hole. “How much air is in those tanks?” Nina said.

  Moxie ground his sneaker in the dirt and said nothing.

  “Eighty cubic feet in each one,” Danny said.

  “How long does it last?”

  “It depends.”

  Before Nina could ask what it depended on, a bubble broke on the surface of the pond. More bubbles followed. They grew bigger. Nina peered into the water. Something was rising fast. Nina felt Moxie tugging at her hand.

  “Get back,” he said.

  But she didn’t move. The next moment a man came bursting through the surface, threw off his mask, swam frantically toward land. It was Bernie.

  “Get back,” said Moxie.

  But Nina couldn’t. Bernie reached the edge of the pond, pulled himself to his feet. He looked right at Nina, standing ten feet away. His eyes were bright red. He took the spear gun off his belt, jammed the butt in his abdomen and began pulling the thick rubber band toward the notch at the base of the spear. Muscles popped up inside his wet suit; cords stood out in his neck. The thick rubber band stretched taut; the clip at its end came to within an inch of the notch in the spear. At that moment, the boy took a step forward, his hands balled into fists. Bernie stared at him. No one moved. Then blood spurted out of Bernie’s ears, his nose, his mouth. He gasped and fell at their feet.

  Not long after, something came crashing through the woods: Matthias. He stopped, chest heaving, looked at Nina, Danny, Moxie, Bernie. He knelt beside Bernie, put his finger on Bernie’s neck, checked his pressure gauge. “Still had air,” he said, almost to himself. He pulled up the tanks that Bernie had lowered into the blue hole, checked the gauge. “Full.”

  “He scared, mahn,” said Moxie. “He seen the lusca.”

  Matthias shook his head.

  “No luscas down there?” Moxie said.

  “He got lost, that’s all,” Matthias replied. “He must have taken a wrong turn on the way back and panicked.”

  “Brock?”

  “It’s easy, Mox.” Matthias started to smile. “I get lost and panic every damn time I go in there.” All at once, he was laughing. Nina thought that he might not be able to stop. But he did. The next thing she knew he was kissing her on the mouth. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

  Matthias picked up Bernie Muller’s spear gun. “Let’s go,” he said, and loaded it in one easy motion.

  44

  The wind rose. It blew a dark ceiling of rainclouds across the sky, whipped up a seascape of sharp gray peaks and white spume, cut the telephone link between Zombie Bay and Constable Welles’s little station in Conchtown. Moxie jumped in the Jeep and drove toward the Conchtown road. Danny remained at the phone, trying to contact Sergeant Cuthbertson in Nassau. Matthias and Nina hurried to the dock.

  As soon as he stepped on the deck of So What, Matthias thought of Cesarito and the nighttime crossing to the beach at the foot of the Sierra Maestra. Cesarito, singing to keep his courage up: De ansair ma fren. It had been the overture to so much that had gone wrong, beginning with the two years on Isla de Piños, ending with his marriage to Marilyn.

  This crossing was going to be different. It was different already: day not night, with a strong wind to mask the engine noise and no deluded counter-revolutionaries on board. Instead he had Nina. He watched her freeing the bow line. He could tell she didn’t have much experience in boats, but she glanced at the stern, saw what he had done and did the same. This was going to be easy: he had Nina, the wind, the day. And an older version of himself. He hoped he was smarter. Matthias cast off and hit the throttles.

  So What surged forward. A cold gray wave broke over the bow and drenched Nina. “Better come aft a bit,” Matthias called over the engine noise. “It might be bumpy when we get outside.”

  Clutching the gunwale, Nina made her way to the console, lurched toward it, grabbed, hung on. The boat shot over a wall of water. Were they airborne? Surely not, but the next moment they slammed back down with a force that buckled her knees. Then another wall appeared, much too big to be called a wave, and they did it all over again. Images spun by: walls of water, the air full of spray, and possibly rain too, Matthias’s brown hands on the wheel. And was he whistling under his breath? Yes. He was a lousy whistler. It took a long time before Nina recognized the tune he was attempting: “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Was he trying to be funny? She glanced at his face and couldn’t tell. The
sea had soaked his hair, the wind had slicked it back: he looked like a seal in its natural element.

  “We’re out of the bay now,” he said. “It could be worse.”

  Ahead waited the kind of sea Nina had only seen in news clips during hurricane season. The boat—so ludicrously tiny—rose up, slammed down, rose up, slammed down. Waves, not just their tips, but whole waves, broke over the boat and smacked against her. She hung on to the console with all her might, so intent on staying attached to the boat that at first she wasn’t aware of her seasickness. Then she was aware of it. Then it was all she was aware of.

  Matthias was saying something. She couldn’t hear. The engines shrieked, the wind howled. “I can’t hear a fucking thing,” Nina shouted.

  Matthias cupped a hand to her ear. She felt hard rough skin on her cheek, felt his breath on her earlobe. “This is perfect,” he said. “We’ll come in downwind. They won’t hear a sound.”

  “What if they see us?”

  He laughed. “Then it won’t be perfect.”

  After a while a dark gray form separated itself from all the other grays. It was a small island, shaped like the top half of an H. Nina saw trees, a beach, a long pier. Matthias didn’t head toward the pier. He swung around to the right-hand end of the island—the southern end, she thought—and pulled back on the throttles.

  The sea was calmer in the lee of the island. Ahead lay a narrow beach. They were still fifteen or twenty yards from it when Matthias dropped anchor and cut the engines. “Can’t put it on the beach in this weather,” he said, his voice suddenly seeming loud. “We’ll have to swim.”

  The sea was calmer, but not calm. Nina had never swum in water like that. She heard herself say, “Let’s go.” Matthias picked up the spear gun. They jumped over the side.

  Not so bad, Nina thought. The sea made her no colder or wetter than she already was. And it took her nausea away. She swam up one side of a wave and slid down the other. She did that a few more times before her foot touched bottom. Nina stood up. A wave knocked her down. She stumbled to the beach.

  Matthias was beside her. “Okay?” he said.

  “Okay.”

  He moved toward a clump of sea-grapes, parted them with the spear gun, disappeared. Nina hurried after him, not seeing the narrow path through the vegetation until it was a step away. She took it.

  The path climbed to the top of a hill. Nina looked down. She saw a small clapboard house, two cottages, sheds, and in the distance a formal garden with a pink pool in the center, and a big house beyond that. She saw no people, no dogs, no living creatures.

  “Yo soy turisto,” Matthias said.

  “That’s not going to work.”

  He smiled and motioned her forward.

  It was raining hard. The path down the bluff was slippery. They scrambled and slipped to the bottom. Ahead lay a lawn of Bermuda grass and the small house Nina had seen from the top. It was a tidy house, with white walls, blue trim, lace curtains in the windows and a screened verandah. At the end of the verandah sat a baby carriage.

  “Run,” Matthias said.

  They ran: out of the bushes, across the Bermuda grass, past the verandah, to the side of the house. They dropped to their knees beneath a window, slowly raised their heads and looked inside.

  Nina saw a kitchen. Three men sat at a table, eating scrambled eggs and drinking coffee. Two looked like blond Elvis Presleys, thick-necked and stocky. The third was older and trimmer. Nina had never seen any of them before, but she recognized the leathery-skinned woman frying bacon at the stove: it was the hospital volunteer with the strange accent who had offered her candy, tricked Verna Rountree into leaving the nursery, taken her baby and left a Cabbage Patch Kid. Nina’s heart beat wildly.

  Matthias tugged her back down. He crawled around the corner of the house. Nina crawled after him. They stopped at a door. From its position, Nina knew it must open directly into the kitchen. Matthias rose. Nina rose too, conscious of nothing but her pounding heart: a scared creature trapped in her chest. Matthias looked at her. “Keep me out of trouble,” he said in a normal tone. Then he rocked back and kicked the door in. It flew into the kitchen, hinges, screws and all.

  And then they were standing side by side in the room. At the table, the two thick-necked men were looking up in surprise, one of them revealing a mouthful of yellow egg, but the older man was already rising from his chair, his eyes, Nina saw, on a shotgun in the corner. Matthias pointed the spear gun at him. “Let’s do this right, Gene,” he said. The man sat down. Matthias backed toward the corner and picked up the shotgun, as though he had known it was there from the start. “Hands off the frying pan, Mrs. Albury,” he said to the woman, not looking at her. “Take a seat between Billy and Bobby.” Wiping her hands on her apron, the woman moved toward the table and sat.

  “Where is my baby?” Nina said to her.

  Mrs. Albury’s eyes narrowed. For a moment, Nina thought she was getting ready to spit. But Mrs. Albury didn’t spit. She turned away and said nothing.

  “That’s not doing it right, Gene,” Matthias said.

  “I don’t know what you talking about, fella.”

  Matthias opened the shotgun, knocked out the shells and tossed them through the doorway. Then he raised the gun and smashed it over the stove, breaking it in half. He approached the table, holding up the barrel. “Don’t make me angry, Gene. I won’t be able to stop.”

  Gene Albury opened his mouth, but before he could speak his wife said, “You keep your mouth shut.”

  Albury closed his mouth. The three men at the table looked at Matthias, then at Mrs. Albury. Nina understood why she had been chosen to kidnap her baby. The woman couldn’t be scared. Matthias moved closer to the table. Nina realized he was capable of striking the first blow. Everyone else knew it too. It was quiet in the kitchen; Nina heard nothing but the wind and the rain. And something else: a crying baby.

  She ran from the kitchen, down a corridor, into a room at the end. A crib stood in the corner. And a fair-haired baby boy lay in it. He was on his stomach, raising his head and crying when he couldn’t keep it up. He wore the blue sweater that Inge Standish had knit, and had blue eyes like Happy Standish’s.

  Her baby.

  Nina reached for him, picked him up, held him. He stopped crying. Nina forgot everything; everything that had happened, everything that might happen. For a few moments she dwelt in a now of perfect peace, her arms wrapped around her baby and her baby wrapped within them. Her fingers stroked his fine hair, so long at the back. They had remembered the feel of it exactly. To feel his hair again was to be restored.

  “Nina?”

  She heard Matthias calling and carried the baby back to the kitchen. “Got him?” Matthias said.

  “But not her,” Nina replied. She faced Mrs. Albury. “Where is Clea?”

  “Clea?”

  “Laura Bain’s baby. The one you stole from her backyard in Dedham.”

  Mrs. Albury started to speak, stopped, began again. She couldn’t hold in her reply. “Six-feet under,” she said.

  “You killed her?”

  “Not hardly. She was defective right from the start.”

  “Did you get her treatment?”

  Mrs. Albury met Nina’s gaze but didn’t speak.

  “That’s the same as killing her,” Nina said. She heard hatred in her own voice. “And you’re going to pay for it.”

  Mrs. Albury summoned up some hatred of her own. Nina realized the woman had vast reserves. “You’re all talk,” she said.

  “Then how come I’ve got my baby back and you’re going to jail?”

  “I think not,” said a voice behind Matthias. “I’ve made all the sacrifices I’m going to.”

  Inge Standish stood outside the door, with a rifle aimed at his back. Matthias didn’t even turn to look. He sent the shotgun barrel spinning backwards through the doorway. It caught Inge Standish on the side of the head. She staggered but didn’t fall, didn’t drop the gun. Out of the corner of
her eye, Nina saw Mrs. Albury move. The woman reached into her apron, pulled out a fish knife and darted toward her. Nina was turning her body to shield the baby when something silver flashed across the room and shot through Mrs. Albury’s leg, pinning her to the wall.

  “Ma,” cried one of the younger men. Then the table tipped over and the Alburys were up and moving. Matthias threw the empty spear gun at them and started running toward the hall. He grabbed Nina as he went by.

  The rifle cracked behind them. Wood splintered. They ran down the hall into the baby’s room. There were no windows on the back wall. Matthias lowered his shoulder and ran through it. Nina followed him. With the baby in one arm, she ran as hard as she could, across the Bermuda grass, up the bluff, down the other side. The sea looked rougher than before, the boat smaller and farther from the beach.

  “Here,” Matthias said, reaching for the baby.

  Nina wouldn’t let him go.

  “It’ll be quicker,” Matthias said.

  Nina gave him the baby. They swam to the boat. Even with the baby he was there before her, holding him in one arm while he raised anchor with the other. Nina pulled herself over the transom and fell on the deck. Figures appeared on the hill. Something tore a chunk of fiberglass off the console.

  “Stay down,” Matthias said, handing her the baby and switching on the engines. He spun the boat around and shoved the throttles all the way down. The boat surged forward. Then something shattered the casing of one of the outboards. It stopped running and began to smoke. The boat slowed. Matthias glanced back at Two-Head Cay. “She’s good,” he said. He knelt on the deck, unclamped the ruined motor and pushed it into the sea. The boat went faster, but not like before, Nina thought.

  They rounded the tip of Two-Head Cay and started back across the Tongue of the Ocean. “Take the wheel,” Matthias said. “Aim for that bluff straight ahead.”