When he finished, he examined his work. A bristly caterpillar of knotted threads inched across her leg. Blood still oozed, but didn’t stream out, even when he loosened the tourniquet that had saved her twice now. Even if she lived, she’d bear a fearsome scar and might never walk easily again. He hoped she would forgive him for that.
“Though of course, I’d carry you forever if you’d let me, Princess.”
At his words, her eyes opened and she shuddered, then began retching violently. He covered her with her robe and held her close, willing the warmth of his body into hers as she shook convulsively. “Shizuko?” he said gently, calling her back to herself. “Shizuko-hime?”
Tears streamed from her closed eyes. He didn’t ask if she was relieved or grieved to find herself on board his ship once more, alive once more. He understood more of her life than she realized, maybe. She whispered, “There was a dragon.”
“Yes. And a princess who saved the world. She nearly died for her trouble, but instead she married the man who loved her and lived to a very great age.”
“No, Hercule-chan. She died. Tamatori died. It was her best ending.”
“Perhaps we could write her a new ending. Perhaps instead, the princess bore many daughters and sons to her very foolish man. Perhaps they lived for a very long time, far from the sea, and were happy to the end of their days.” She’d never answered him when he’d asked the first time, so now he held his breath, waiting for her response.
Her eyes remained closed, but her lips drew up in the merest ghost of a smile. At least it was a true smile. He wondered if she knew he’d always been able to tell the difference.
“Thank you for bringing me back, Hercule-chan. There are worse things than dying, but I was not ready to go. Although perhaps I thought I was. But it is really over? The dragon sleeps?”
He nodded. “I’ll carry the devices far away. They should never have been allowed so near the sea.”
Her smile faded and she whispered, “Thank you, Hercule-chan. I must ask something of you—”
Her words were too formal, her expression too solemn for anything but a polite refusal. His heart sank. But whatever else she was: fisherman’s daughter or courtesan or the woman he’d loved for so long without ever saying anything, she had also just saved the world. He owed her any assistance he could give her, money or physical protection or even his absence if that was what she required.
Still unsmiling, she opened her eyes. “When our first daughter is born, my love, can we name her for my sister, Keiko?”
Carefully then, as carefully as if she were made of glass or silk—strong and fragile in equal parts—he gathered her up in his arms.
“And they lived happily ever after,” he whispered fiercely, a promise as much as an answer.
Her eyes found his. She nodded. And then she smiled.
HIGH SULFUR HOT SPRINGS AND
CAMPING PARK
James Van Pelt
“Worst job in the universe,” said Harris, sprawled in the lifeguard stand under an umbrella, his nose white-zinc slathered and a towel covering his legs and feet. Red-haired, freckled, tall and smooth-muscled, he didn’t tan; he broiled. “I can’t believe OSHA doesn’t investigate the working conditions. Haven’t they heard of sun exposure and carcinoma? I’ll be a human-shaped skin tumor before I’m twenty-one.”
“If you’re solar-phobic, you picked a poor place to work.” Heat waves shimmered off the desert hills and bluffs beyond the pool ground’s fence. Puddles on the cement shrank and disappeared in minutes.
“It’s the competitive swimming curse. Hang around a pool for years, training to swim fast, and you’re doomed to work a watch tower.”
At the beginning of that summer, I’d found the best life-guarding job I ever had—the High Sulfur Hot Springs and Camping Park in northwest Nevada—but in fifteen years I’d never guarded with a guy with a crummier attitude than Harris. I know; I’m thirty-two, which sounds old for a lifeguard. It’s a college kid’s job. What can I do? I like the work. Pool water got into my system, I guess. Washing down the deck in the morning. Helping the swim coach roll up the lane lines after an early practice. Putting up chairs and umbrellas.
I’d watched city pools in Tahoe and Reno. I’d done beach guarding in California, too. There’s nothing like climbing on top the guard stand and settling in at the beginning of a shift. You’ve got an area, and you’re responsible for it, so after the whine-fest with Harris, I checked to make sure the other guards were in position, then inventoried what was in front of me. The family group in the water at my feet had a five-year old with cheap, plastic inflatable water wings wrapped around her upper arms. Not safe at all. A little farther out, an adolescent couple walked in the shallow end. He carried her and her head rested on his shoulder. Very sweet. I wouldn’t worry about them unless the public display of affection thing got out of hand. Three boys showed off on the diving board, whooping and doing fancy flips and twists. If they dove straight off and gave each other room, probably no problem there either, although a couple days ago, a guy I wasn’t worried about at all, out of nowhere, decided to do a reverse dive. That’s the kind that looks like he’s going to go off in a regular dive, but at the end of the board he rotates backwards. His feet fly out in front and keep going up until they’re over his head. It looks awesome and unlikely, but a good diver can do full flips that way. This guy, though, did the reverse motion without moving away from the board. Straight up, straight down. Clunk. Head on the board and he’s unconscious in the water with a wreath of blood around his neck and shoulders.
I pulled him out and he got a handful of stitches from the experience. It just shows you can’t ignore anyone. Guarding is about watching people who probably won’t get in trouble, but there’s enough of them that someone always does.
So the job is good wherever I go, despite what Harris said. Sun. Sitting. Great people to work with, almost all at the pool to have fun. You just have to be aware. Mostly my interaction with the crowd is either “Don’t run on the deck” or “Don’t hang on the ropes.” Sounds calm if it wasn’t also life or death work. Laid back, restful, and completely vital. Besides, there’s lots of skin and people who are fit, tanned, and beautiful, at least some of them.
But guarding a beach is a totally different skill set than guarding a public pool, and guarding at High Sulfur Hot Springs and Camping Park wasn’t like either. It was my first natural hot springs pool. The stuff I knew about pool chemistry went out the window here. About a million gallons of sulfurous-smelling mineral water welled up from the spring a day, so we didn’t worry about adding chlorine or tracking the PH. Mostly we checked for bacterial content. The water turned over completely a couple times every twenty-four hours.
We closed at ten. Harris walked the deck to stack chairs while the other guards picked up trash, gathered lost and found (flip-flops, cell phones, keys, towels, goggles, and sun glasses made up the bulk). I loaded the beer and tequila I’d bought before work into a cooler and then onto the ten-meter board lift before sending it up.
Most man-made swimming pools don’t have interesting histories, while the ocean is timeless and the same from beach to beach, but High Sulfur Hot Springs is unique. The bottomless deep end, for example. Well, not really, but it’s over 400 feet down to where the spring water flows from dozens of cracks in the rock, some wide enough for a diver to get through if the water wasn’t 122 degrees. No one knows how deep those cracks go. Before the pool, the spring created a good-sized pond in the desert canyon, with Cactus Creek dumping in cold water at one end, then draining off in the other, with an extra million gallons of heated water from below. It all ended in the Humboldt River. Indians never used it, although they were in the area. Maybe they didn’t like it. Before the High Sulphur Hot Springs group developed the site ten years ago, this wide spot in the canyon must have been quite pretty, if you didn’t mind the rotten-egg smell.
The pond’s surface temperature probably ranged from 90 degrees and up depend
ing on how fast Cactus Creek ran. If the creek dried, the springs’ temperature would rise to over 120 degrees. When an animal like a deer fell in, it would scald to death in minutes. I imagined the bottom was littered with bones.
Once the developers took over, though, the springs changed its look. In the pool itself, they smoothed the rock walls ten feet down and bolted in ladders every twenty feet. They dynamited a long, wide area to be the shallow end, then poured cement deck all around. Water flows were moderated to keep the surface area at eighty-eight degrees—lots of complicated plumbing. The area to be guarded was huge. It took three guards to watch the wading section, and four in the deep end. Added to the pool area were three diving boards: two one-meter and one three-meter, and a ten-meter platform that was only open for exhibitions. Three slide tubes emptied into long troughs beside the baby pool, and they installed fountain features kids could play in near the facility’s entrance and by the shallow end. They built a pool-side concession stand, a restaurant, a bar, a hotel complete with casino, and the RV park. And that’s how you create a tourist attraction in Nowhere, Nevada. Before long, horse outfitters offered guided trips into the dry hills, the biking community built single-track bike trails, and a traveling carnival settled in to make High Sulphur Hot Springs its permanent home.
I liked guarding best at night, for the ambience. The spring Harris joined the staff, they put colored underwater lights in the deep end to a hundred feet or so. The blue lights were best. Green made the pool look like an apple martini, yellow was just gross, of course, and red creeped me out, as if the pool was a tremendous gun shot into the desert’s forehead. I think blue lights created the conditions for Harris to become a hero. They gave Harris his chance.
The head guard picked the night lights, so I always chose blue. The deep end glowed, and the spring water ran so clear that when we stood on the ten-meter platform looking down, it was as deep as space.
We’d planned a staff party for Friday, just the evening crew, seven guards and the cashier. Four women and four guys. Maggie, a twenty-one year old studying criminal justice at Great Basin College in Elko who dealt blackjack at the casino in the mornings, started the festivities. We sat in a circle on the ten-meter platform around a little pot-bellied barbecue that had just enough room for four hamburgers. She reached into the cooler, retrieved a liter-sized tequila bottle, unscrewed the lid, and threw it into the darkness. “Whoops, we’ll have to drink it all now!”
Things grew increasingly spinny and weird after that. Lots of limes, salt, tequila, and beer. At some point, we all were face down on the platform’s edge, looking into the pool. I dropped an empty bottle. Not a whisper of wind. The surface was still and clear as glass. The bottle fell away as if it dropped toward a black hole. Then, sploosh, it hit, sending out a perfect bulls-eye of blue-edged ripples from the center. The bottle, trailing bubbles at first, sank farther and farther away until it vanished below the last lights.
God, it was awesome.
Which, of course, meant that we had to fly ourselves. I went first. A few steps back, a quick trot to the edge, and a leap.
I’m not a diver. A jump from ten meters makes me nervous. There’s that moment when the world drops away that’s always a rush, but here I felt like I was suspended over a great, blue eye. It rose toward me and I couldn’t even scream. When I hit, the bubbles seemed to fluoresce. Glorious! Totally glorious.
Everyone tried it. Harris, it turned out, had a diving background along with the years on a swim team. He did a handstand on the edge, leaned out, then turned two somersaults before cutting the water in a clean dive. Maggie suggested that it didn’t mean a thing unless we did it naked. Lit by the pool’s azure lights and a half moon that hung over the desert, she stripped off her suit with drunken dignity. “I am a god!” she announced, hands in the air, feet apart, and then she leapt, and I thought she was a god, and the other guards were gods, and so was I. We laughed like fools as we pulled at our suits, then, naked, flying, crashed down into that great, blue circle.
When the party ended, Maggie and I climbed down together. Harris said he wanted to spend the night on the platform, so we left him wrapped in a blanket after making him promise not to wander off an edge. I kept the pool lights on for him. I should have known better.
In my apartment that night, I couldn’t sleep. Too much liquor, I suppose, but every time I closed my eyes, I saw that one eye below me, blue at the edge, black in the center, waiting to swallow me whole. I shivered. Even in the hot Nevada night, I shook.
Harris waited for me in the guard shack. He must have had a worse night than I did. Dark circles under his eyes, pale face, even for him, hair uncombed.
“Welcome to a tequila sunrise,” I said. “Too much acetaldehyde in the system?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s what your liver turns alcohol into.”
“I’m not hung over. I saw something last night.”
“A god?” I laughed.
He looked confused.
“Maggie.”
“No, not that. Have you ever seen anything weird in the pool?”
“I saw a ninety-four year old bald dude in a thong a couple of months ago.”
“Can you stay late tonight? I got to show you something. It’s driving me crazy.”
My heart sank. I had an idea what he was talking about. I hoped I was wrong. It was kind of my secret. “Yeah, sure. I’ll bring the beer.”
Maggie came into the shack then, interrupting us. Harris grabbed his floppy hat and sunglasses before heading to the deck. Maggie truly did seem hung over and she didn’t meet Harris’ eyes as he left. All I got from her was a mumbled, “Good morning.” Evidently she didn’t always skinny dip. I’d have to talk to her about it later. It wasn’t a big deal.
Busy time at the pool. Three swimming saves, which I think is a record for a regular day. (The record for a private group is five, but everyone was drunk.) I made the first one. A thirteen-year old girl wearing a Justin Bieber tee shirt slipped under the rope between the wading pool and the deep end to get a beach ball. There’s no slope. You’re either in four feet or you’re in four-hundred feet. Some drowners flail about on the surface, and they might even get a scream out, but she slipped off the edge and didn’t come up. Most drownings are quiet like that. I watch the rope closely, so I was in the water about ten seconds after she sank, towing a rescue tube. Didn’t even have to dive to get her. Snagged her hand and hauled her onto the tube.
She coughed up water and said, “That’s some tough tacos,” which is the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard anyone say in such a situation. The other guards laughed when I told them later.
Maggie made save number two. A really heavy Asian guy knocked the wind out of himself when his flip off the three-meter board went one and a quarter turns, which turned it into an epic belly-flop. She swam him to the edge and bounced him onto the deck without help, where he lay on his back for about five minutes. Maggie only weighs about a hundred and ten, I’d guess. No hangover in her when it counts.
Harris made the third. We get a lot of retirees at the pool. They swim in the morning when its cooler, gamble in the afternoon, and then come back for an evening dip. The elderly have their own set of issues. A walking cane on a slippery deck, for instance. Anyways, this guy, who didn’t look all that old, stroked out in the wading pool. He was by himself and just flopped over, face down. Harris saw him right off, got to him, then rolled him so he could breathe. One side of the guy’s face hung there, and blood filled his eye. An EMT unit was on deck immediately and I heard that by the evening the guy was doing okay. If you get the right drugs to someone having a stroke early, they have a pretty good chance.
The pool gave a twenty-five buck bonus for a save—the only place I’ve ever worked that did that—so it was only natural for me to invite Maggie to late-night two to see what Harris wanted to talk to me about. Seventy-five bucks buys a nice party for three guards.
Harris caught my eye several times d
uring the day, but didn’t say anything, while Maggie brightened up by mid-shift. “Aspirin and a Dr. Pepper work wonders for me.”
I ordered a pizza for closing time. The three of us sat on the admissions counter waiting for it. The deck lights flicked out and the staff went home. A quarter mile away, across the park, the only greenery within fifty miles, the casino sent cryptic neon messages into the night.
“You stay here much after hours?” asked Harris.
“It’s peaceful. Sometimes you hear coyotes.”
Maggie said, “I’m just here for the food.” She laughed, a pleasant contralto, not one of those high-pitched squeals that get on my nerves by the time we close up. I worked an all-girls private academy party in San Diego once. Fifty thirteen-year olds. The migraine lasted for a week and I’ve been sensitive since.
“Ah, the pizza guy,” I said.
We sent the beer and food on the lift, then climbed the steps to the platform’s top.
“I like it up here,” said Maggie. She stood at the rail, looking away from the pool, toward the desert hills.
“You can’t get higher unless you’re on the casino roof.” I was trying to picture her as the god she was last night. Maybe it was the moon or the pool light, but she still had it. Lithe, athletic, strong, great smile.
Harris didn’t say anything. He sat on the platform’s edge, his legs swinging free. I sighed and grabbed a beer to join him. Maggie followed. I was right about why he wanted me up here.
“Do you see them?” he asked.
I did. I’d seen them before. Deep in the pool, right at the edge of the farthest lights. At first they were hard to pick out, because they were dark-skinned on a black background, but the blue highlighted them when they moved, and once you knew what to look for, they were easy to spot. Distance is a funny thing. Thirty feet, for example, isn’t that far. It’s a first down in football. But if you put thirty feet on edge, that’s a three-story building, and even if there’s water at the bottom, it’s a long fall. That’s how high a ten-meter platform is. Water depth is even more problematic. A common test in a lifesaving class is to put a big rubber brick at the bottom of a ten-foot deep pool and have the student do a surface dive to get it. Surprisingly, quite a few students fail that test the first time. If you’re not used to it, the pressure on the ears is uncomfortable, plus the scared kitten part of you freaks out because you’ve got to go back up that ten feet for air. A hundred feet, then, is ten of those ten-foot challenges, each one with higher pressure, and each one that much farther away from your next breath. It’s hard to believe that the world record for free diving is over five-hundred feet.
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