Flashback

by Nevada Barr

  The superintendent of Dry Tortugas and Everglades had stuck to her guns and backed the unpopular ban. The results were much what the NPS had hoped they'd be. Not only were there more and bigger fish within the park boundaries, but significantly more and bigger fish were being caught outside the boundaries as well. By banning fishing in fifty thousand acres of sea, a nursery, a veritable cornucopia of fishes, had been created.

  None of this impressed the sportfishermen. Talk still turned ugly when the subject came up, and they still whined piteously over the inconvenience of having to go a mile or two farther from their favorite anchorages to legally drop their lines in the water.

  Anna was firmly on the side of the fishes. As far as she was concerned, a less populated harbor was a perk, not a consequence. She turned the Boston Whaler and backed deftly into her slot. Water and boating skills honed as a patrol ranger at Isle Royale National Park in Lake Superior that she'd thought lost in the intervening years had come back with a week's practice, and she gloried in their return.

  Maintenance's boat, the Atlantic Ranger, was not at the dock. Anna was just as glad. She had a little time to grab a bite to eat, say "hi" to her cat and gather up her gear.

  Twenty minutes later, when she came down in suit and flip-flops, the many contusions left by her encounter with the coral complaining about being exposed to the direct rays of the sun, Daniel and Mack were sitting in the shade outside the shop waiting for her.

  "Number five up and running?" she asked as she neared them. Daniel shot her a peculiar look, and she wondered if he took it personally when the generators consigned to his care were on the fritz.

  "Right as rain," Mack said. He changed the subject as the two men fell into step with her. "What are we diving for?"

  "Identification, mostly," Anna replied. "I'm hoping the green boat has a registration number or, failing that, a serial number on the engine that's still readable. So far the Florida police haven't had any luck tracing our John Doe."

  "Juan Doe," Mack said. Anna didn't know if he was being racist or clever. She let it pass. Mack wore only orange trunks and sandals, and sneaking a look at his back, she found her guess had been correct. Striping the lean muscles and knotty spine were the same narrow whipping scars she'd noticed on his legs and upper arms.

  Dive tanks, buoyancy compensator vests, weights and regulators were kept in a small room behind the ladies' toilets on the visitors' dock. A few minutes were spent loading the heavy gear, then they were motoring out toward the wreck. It crossed Anna's mind that the NPS would want the Bay Ranger salvaged and possibly the Scarab brought up and disposed of. Old wrecks had charm. She wasn't so sure about the modern variety. Having no idea what went into salvage work, she made a mental note to call the chief ranger in Homestead at the next opportunity.

  The seas were by no means rough, but neither were they at the dead calm that had facilitated diving the day before. There was a stiffening wind out of the southeast and a definite chop to the water. The rangers' boats in the Dry Tortugas were graced with Global Positioning Systems, but Anna hadn't been a boat patrol ranger since the days of loran--long range navigation--and hadn't yet bothered to learn how to use them. Trusting in the old ways, she'd marked the wrecks with buoys. Despite the chop, they found them easily.

  It was decided she and Mack would dive the Scarab first to see if they could find any identifying marks, numbers or papers. Often boats kept important papers in waterproof containers so the idea was not that far-fetched. That done, they'd scavenge Bob's boat and bring up anything useful or even detachable. Once the sport divers or snorkelers found the Bay Ranger, she would be picked clean by souvenir hunters. Regardless of laws forbidding the vandalizing of sunken artifacts in protected waters, it was virtually impossible to overcome the allure of taking home a trophy pried from a genuine shipwreck.

  Ignoring the uproar from her abused flesh, Anna wriggled into an old dive skin--the nicer one shredded in the explosion--fins, vest, snorkel and mask. Mack, finished before she was, waited till she was ready, and together they rolled off the gunwale.

  The pristine clarity of the water was gone, as was the glassy surface above. Particulate matter clouded vision and leached colors from fish and coral. Visibility underwater was an ever-changing thing. Like the weather, it seemed to make its own unpredictable choices. One day clear, cloudy the next and often without the easy logic of groundswell or storm to explain the sudden fluctuations.

  Mack vanished in the murk, swimming expertly with an economy of motion. He wore neither dive suit nor skin. Underwater his body hair floated and sunlight refracted, making his scars startlingly apparent. Or perhaps Anna had speculated on them so long and so rudely with the lighthouse keepers she'd sensitized herself. Now they put her in mind, not of an abused child, but a tiger shark. Kicking hard, she caught up and swam beside Mack. The physical exertion was welcome. With the murky water and the fleeting thought of man-as-tiger-shark, she worried her mind might be taking that particular twist it had the night before. Moving, working, relegated the ghoulies and ghosties to a half-remembered dream state.

  The hull was scattered in fragments. Between them she and Mack turned over every piece they could find, the largest being the stern portion, without finding any name or numbers. Either the identifying marks had been pulverized in the explosion or the owners of this super-loaded speedboat chose to remain anonymous.

  As they worked, it began to dawn on Anna that someone had been stirring in the pile. Though she'd not said it to herself in so many words, the idea germinated when they'd moved the stern. After the initial explosion the orange PFD had been floating like a child's birthday balloon above the transom, tethered by its own strap. Following the second explosion it had been pinned beneath the upended stern. Now it was gone. If there'd been nothing else, she would have assumed it had gotten loose and floated away. The sea is a strange place. Things happen.

  But there were other changes. Nothing dramatic, nothing even as noticeable as the removal of the life jacket; it was that objects weren't quite the way she remembered: a little to the right, farther left, turned on its side, shifted farther under or over something else. It reminded her of the way drawers and dressing tables look after being searched and restored to their presearch configuration by most males. Everything is there. Everything is where it was. But better, the carefully tended chaos made slightly more orderly, slightly less random. Anna hadn't come primarily for taking photos, but she took a lot of them, and from the same angles she remembered the last shots having been taken. When she compared the two sets of photographs she would know for sure if someone had been diving here, doing major rifling, in the past twelve hours. No, Anna corrected herself as she lined up a shot of the shattered midsection, I already know for sure. The pictures are to prove it. Whether to herself or someone else depended on whether she continued to see ghosts or not.

  Finally, each and every piece of debris examined, Anna gave up on finding either name or registration number. Their only remaining hope was getting a serial number off one of the Scarab's engines in hopes they could trace it to the manufacturer and from there through the various sales slips to its present owner.

  Both engines, imposing chunks of black metal with white plastic tubing, were virtually intact. One was buried in the sand, the top down, the number unreachable. The blast had separated the other from the hull and carried it to a complex, if small, mountain range. Anna chose not to think of the thousands of years of careful creation destroyed on impact or the millions of tiny lives extinguished. The grace and delicacy of the coral cities put Anna in mind of Dr. Seuss's Whoville. She couldn't help picturing the living coral as full of minute Who people going about their little Who lives. The fairy tale--programmed anthropomorphism--made the destruction ridiculously poignant.

  To complete the image, the plastic tubing on the engine, ends severed from wherever they'd been designed to take a necessary fluid, floated out like tentacles from the black squatting body of the monster.

>   Too many horror movies as a kid, Anna thought, and smiled around the plastic plug of her regulator as she pictured Rodan pursuing a Japanese maiden across the sea floor.

  Catching Mack's attention, she pointed to herself, then to the engine.

  Mack shook his head and pointed to the surface. He tapped his watch, then the pressure gauge that indicated how much air remained in the tank.

  Anna looked at her own gauge. She had just under half a tank. Even given the difference in their size, unless Mack had been hyperventilating, it was hard to believe he was out of air. She tapped her own gauge and circled thumb and index finger in the "okay" sign, then began to swim to him to see if there was a problem with his equipment but, after shaking the gauge hard, he gave an exaggerated shrug and the "okay" sign.

  Evidently it had fixed itself. She turned and finished the short journey to where the engine lay on uneven peaks of coral. The explosion had flipped it so it landed top downward on the rocky surface. Little fishes had already begun exploring the intricate crevices and caves of metal. Tiny eyes, working mouths and colorful flicks of tails met Anna as she inspected the underside for identifying numbers. Mostly she was being thorough. Serial numbers were meant to be seen and used while the vehicle the engine was housed in was right-side up. Manufacturers usually put them on a metal part close to the top.

  Mack floated nearby; more company than help, a flicker of color and movement in her peripheral vision much like the shy visit of a large fish. Having proved to herself there were to be no easy answers, Anna let her body sink a couple feet deeper. The nest of coral boulders the engine rested on was not more than three and four feet high. Fins on the sandy bottom, she was at eye level with where the metal met the rock in a crush of once-living coral and plant life. It hadn't fallen on a single boulder but the meeting of several slowly growing together. Beneath the engine was a miniature canyon eighteen inches or so deep and three or four feet long. The top of this ravine, capped by iron and steel, was a couple of feet across, the bottom tapered to nothing where boulder met boulder. Living walls, now in darkness, housed the delicate and wondrous beings so common in these waters.

  Ignoring the imaginary screams as the Whos of Whoville rushed about in panic, their fairy cities in ruins, Anna poked one arm in, flashlight in hand, and followed it with her head. A skull-shuddering clank stopped her as her air tank rang against the metal of the engine. Between metal and bone, the noise sounded inside her head as if her skull were the bell and her brain the clapper.

  She waited till the ringing ceased shaking her gray matter, then poked about carefully with her little underwater light. She'd not used it before and, like some of the men she'd dated, it was cute but dim. After scraping the back of her hand and murdering several thousand more Whos with her elbow, she found what she was looking for. Maybe. Cramped in at an odd angle with bubbles and wee little Who corpses floating before her eyes, it was hard to be sure.

  Pulling head and flashlight out, she stuck her right arm in up to the shoulder and tried to read the numbers with the tips of her fingers. Her fingertips were, if anything, too sensitive. Such a plethora of information was sent back from the wet and rough and smooth and greasy, one proficient in Braille could possibly have deduced all of Hamlet or prophesied the apocalypse from what her fingers read there.

  Anna was merely confused and frustrated. Again she peered into the triangular-shaped tunnel. There was no egress at the far end. The engine capped a miniature box canyon. Backing off, she pondered the feasibility of shifting the engine. A few experimental shoves alone, then with the help of Mack, couldn't budge it. That was probably just as well. From where she hung before the opening of the black box protecting her number, the edge of the engine to her left only overlapped the edge of the coral by an inch or so. Had they succeeded in shifting the engine it would slide into the crack and, short of a hoist from a salvage ship, she'd never get at the serial number.

  A minute, maybe more, she stared into the hole trying to ignore the solution to her problem by sending her thoughts chasing down various cheeseless rat holes.

  Other avenues exhausted, she was forced back to the obvious. Without her vest and tank she could fit in the crevice. It would take a bit of wriggling to keep her hand up near her eyes so she'd have light when she reached the number, but it wouldn't be that tight a squeeze.

  She'd been in tighter.

  And hated it, she reminded herself. "Hated" was the word she chose to remember from her last crawl in Lechuguilla Cave some years back. It saved her from admitting to herself how terrified she'd been, how desperately close to coming unglued and running mad through the labyrinths of the underworld, a modern metaphor for Tolkein's Gollum.

  Nothing for it, she decided. Mack was hovering and unsettled to the far right edge of her vision. She pointed to herself then to the crevice and began to take off her vest. The regulator hose was long enough; if she held it tight against her chest, she could continue breathing though the tank was not on her back. Anna was much in favor of continuing to breathe.

  Mack was shaking his head pointing at his pressure gauge, then toward the surface. Again Anna looked at her own. Just over a quarter full. They were no more than twenty-five feet down--a free dive. It would take but a minute or two to see if she could get in far enough to read the number.

  While venturing into worlds unfriendly to human beings, Anna tended to err on the side of caution, but they were not even within shouting distance of the danger zone. Mack had done enough dives that this shallow junket in warm waters could hold no horrors for him. Anna guessed he wasn't playing it safe, he simply had an agenda of his own, probably one that involved beer.

  She shook her head, pointed to the crevice, then turned her back on him. Without the vest she was less buoyant and took a weight from her belt so she could move easily in the water, having neither to fight to stay submerged nor struggle to move toward the surface.

  In an unusual synchronicity with the needs of the human world, Mother Nature had created, with the help of many soon-to-be-abused creatures, a shelf near Anna's crevice. There Anna put vest and tank, arranging them so the least amount of disturbance would be caused when she moved into the hole. That done, she lay on her back in the water, her hands on the edge of the engine where it hung over the edge of the coral. Resting a moment, she made sure everything was in order, light clipped in the neck of her dive skin, underwater pad and pencil stuffed under the zipper between her breasts, breathing hose smooth, no kinks. Satisfied, she began pulling herself gently into the crack beneath the Scarab's motor.

  The fit was not tight, but she had to leave her left arm at her side, the hand sticking out of the hole near her left thigh, and use her right hand to pinch and pull herself along. Her face was about six inches below the engine, leaving plenty of room for regulator and goggles. The air hose trailed across her chest and down her left side, where it was held reassuringly in the fingers of her left hand before it snaked away to the tank on the shelf.

  Five seconds, maybe less, and her head bumped gently on the end of the tunnel. Her right elbow was trapped against her ribs, but she had enough space to maneuver hand and wrist easily enough. With a minimum of fumbling, she unclipped the flashlight and turned it on.

  Serial numbers. Bright and clear and nearly new. A feeling of great personal resourcefulness and the joy in a prize won pushed claustrophobia--still an infant at barely ten seconds old--back into the womb. Having clipped the light to the strap on her mask, she wedged her notebook against the engine with the heel of her hand and, using the underwater pen cleverly tethered to the pad, began copying down the numerals.

  Grinding so loud she thought the plates of her skull were coming apart and the number shifted to the right, the heel of her hand carried with it, then weight, crushing weight. Air pushed from her lungs. The flashlight was shoved to the right. The butt of it banged against her teeth, then metal and light were gone.

  That was it. The whole thing. Over in a heartbeat.

&nb
sp; It had happened so quickly it took her a moment to believe she was trapped under an internal combustion engine on the bottom of the ocean. The next thing she noticed was that she was still breathing. Her lungs had to work a little harder. The hose must have been constricted but not pinched closed. Either that or she was hyperventilating. The grinding noise had triggered a shot of adrenaline into her system so substantial her insides felt jellied.

  Over the years, tales had filtered in about people imbued with superhuman strength in time of crises; usually a mother, a child and an overturned tractor were featured. Unfortunately this was not the case with her. Her right arm, pressed tight across her chest, couldn't move itself let alone the tonnage of the engine. Fleetingly she wondered if she were to be entombed beneath the sea, laid out in an eternal flag salute. The thought brought on a twinge of hysteria followed by terror so great it took more willpower than she would have believed she had not to fight herself into an early death.

  Breathe, breathe, breathe. Slow. A breath. Slow. Anna forced herself into a semblance of calm. It was not utterly dark in her crevice. The flashlight was somewhere beside her head, still emitting its feeble beam. The water was a colloidal suspension of Who bodies and Who buildings and Who villages under a black corrugated sky.

  The fantasy, delightful earlier, scared her now. For reasons she hadn't the time or the inclination to pursue, going insane, even in an insane situation, was scary as hell.

  A breath. A count. A breath.

  Panic momentarily at bay, it occurred to her that not only was she not dead, as she had every right to be, and breathing, which she had no right to be, but, near as she could tell, miraculously unhurt. The engine had slipped down only far enough to press her tightly but not to squash anything.

  To Mack it must look as if she'd been killed.

  Another wave of panic swept over her. Living people were rescued as quickly as possible. Americans, especially Americans in the National Park Service, would move mountains, would not rest, would not stop and would spare no expense as long as there was even a slim hope life still burned.