“Sure,” Dortmunder said, as though it were the most natural thing in the world. “Why not?”
“No reason,” she said, with a too-bright smile. “Have you gentlemen ever done any diving before?”
“Diving?” Dortmunder echoed.
“You are talking about diving, aren’t you?” the girl asked.
“Going underwater,” Dortmunder repeated, and even made a little parting-the-waves gesture to make things clearer: putting the backs of his hands together, then sweeping them out to the sides.
“In the ocean,” the girl said dubiously.
“Well, no,” Dortmunder said. “In a kind of lake. But still, you know, under. In it.”
“Freshwater diving,” the girl said, smiling with pleasure that they were communicating after all.
“Walking,” Kelp said. Sticking his oar in, as it were.
So much for communication. Looking helplessly at Kelp, the girl said, “I beg your pardon?”
“We’re not gonna jump in it,” Kelp explained. “Not diving, walking. We’re gonna walk in it.”
“Oh,” she said, and smiled with great healthy delight, saying, “That makes no difference, not with the equipment.” Turning slightly, to include Dortmunder in her smile, she said, “I take it you gentlemen haven’t gone in for diving before.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” Dortmunder told her.
“Absolutely,” she said. “Where are you taking your instruction?”
“Instruction?” Kelp said, but Dortmunder talked over him, saying, “At the lake.”
“And what equipment will you be needing?”
“Everything,” Dortmunder said.
That surprised her again. “Everything? Won’t you be able to rent anything at all from the pro?”
“No, it don’t work that way at this particular lake,” Dortmunder said. “Anyway, right now we’re just looking to see what we’ll need, what kinda equipment and all.”
“Tanks and air and all that,” Kelp added, and pointed toward a number of scuba tanks displayed on the wall behind the glass counter full of regulators and goggles and waterproof flashlights.
The girl lost her smile for good. Frowning from Dortmunder to Kelp and back, she said, “I’m not sure what you gentlemen are up to, but it isn’t diving.”
Dortmunder gave her an offended look. “Yeah, we are,” he said. “Why would we want the stuff?”
“All right,” she said crisply, either giving him the benefit of the doubt or choosing brisk explanation as the quickest way to get rid of these noncustomers. “Clearly,” she said, “you don’t know anything about the world of diving.”
“We’re just starting out,” Dortmunder reminded her. “I told you that, remember?”
“You can’t do it without an instructor,” she said, “and it’s pretty clear you don’t have an instructor.”
Dortmunder said, “Why can’t we just read up on it in a book?”
“Because,” she told him, “there are only two ways you can dive. Either with an accredited instructor right there beside you, or with your certification that you’ve taken and passed the three-day introductory course.”
Kelp said, “You know, you’re not supposed to drive a car without a license, too, but I bet some people do.”
She gave him a severe look and shook her head. From a sunny happy healthy young woman she had segued with amazing suddenness into the world’s most disapproving Sunday School teacher. “It doesn’t work quite the same way,” she said, sounding pleased about that. Pointing at the display of tanks, she said, “I’ll sell you as many of those as you want. But they’re empty. And the only place you can get them filled is an accredited dive shop. And they won’t fill them unless you show your certification or agree to have an instructor go with you.” Her look of satisfaction was pretty galling. “Diving or walking, gentlemen,” she said, “you will not want to go very far underwater, or for very long, with empty tanks. If you’ll excuse me?” And she turned on her heel and went off to sell a $350 Dacor Seachute BCD to a deeply tanned Frenchman with offensively thick and glossy hair.
Leaving, slinking away, clumping morosely down the wide stairs toward Paragon’s street level with their tails between their legs, Dortmunder said, “Okay. We gotta getta guy.”
SIXTEEN
It was raining. Doug Berry, owner and proprietor and sole full-time employee of South Shore Dive Shop in Islip, Long Island, sat alone in his leaky shingle shed built out on its own wooden dock over the waters of the Great South Bay, and read travel brochures about the Caribbean. Steel drum calypso music chimed from the speakers tucked away on the top shelves behind the main counter, sharing space with the Henderson cold-water hoods and the mask-and-snorkel sets. The rickety side walls of the structure were decorated with posters distributed by various manufacturers in the diving field, all showing happy people boogieing along underwater with the assistance of that manufacturer’s products. From the fish net looped below the ceiling were hung shells, ship models and various pieces of diving equipment, either the real things or miniatures. In a front corner, facing the door, stood an old used store-window dummy dressed in every possible necessity and accessory the well-turned-out diver could possibly want.
Outside was more of Doug Berry’s empire. The dock, old and shaky, rotting planks nailed to rotting pilings, was three feet wider than the shed, which was built flush to the right edge of the dock, leaving the three feet on the left for an aisle back to the eighteen feet of additional dock extending out into the bay beyond the rear of the shed. Piled on this dock, under gray or green tarps, were spare air tanks and gasoline tanks and other equipment, all chained against thievery. Tied up on the left side of the dock, also under a tarp, was Doug Berry’s Boston Whaler, with its 235-horse Johnson outboard. The compressor from which air tanks were filled was also out there, under its own shiny blue plastic tarp.
On the landward side of Doug Berry’s domain was the gravel width of customer parking area, containing at the moment only Berry’s custom-packaged black (with blue and silver trim) Ford pickup, with the inevitable bumper sticker on the back: DIVERS GO DEEPER. Beyond the parking area was the potholed blacktop driveway leading out past the marine motor dealership and the wholesale fish company to Merrick Road. All of this was Doug Berry’s, and there he sat, in the middle of his realm, dreaming about the Caribbean.
Yeah, that was the place to be. No goddamn April showers down there. Just warm sun, warm air, warm sand, warm turquoise water. A fella with Doug Berry’s looks and training and skills could…
… rot on the beach.
There he went again, dammit. Doug Berry’s worst flaw, as far as he himself was concerned, was his inability to ignore reality. He’d like to be able to fantasize himself into the dive king of the Caribbean, the bronze god in flippers, slicing through the emerald waters, rescuing beautiful heiresses, discovering buried treasure, either joining pirates or foiling pirates, he’d like to sit here in this miserable shack on this rainy no-business day and dream himself two thousand miles south and twenty degrees warmer, but the reality bone in his head just wouldn’t ever give him a break.
The fact was, guys whose total assets were youth, health, good looks, and an advanced diving certificate were not in exactly short supply in the Caribbean basin. (The pestiferous phrase “dime a dozen” kept circling through Doug Berry’s irritated head, above the aborted fantasies.) And when, in addition, the fellow also already had a couple of clouds over his head—charged with (but not convicted of) receiving stolen goods, for instance—and when he’s already been ejected from the two largest and most prestigious licensing associations in the field, PADI (Professional Association of Diving Instructors) and NAUI (National Association of Underwater Instructors), and when in fact he was now found acceptable only by DIPS (Diving Instructors Professional Society), the newest and smallest and least picky association around, his smart move—no, his only move—was to stay right here in Islip, do a moderate summertime business with college kids and Fire Islanders, do a miserable wintertime business selling equipment to people going away on vacations (there was no way to compete more directly with the big outfits, furnished with their own indoor swimming pools), supplement his livelihood with carpentry and clamming, stock his shelves as much as possible with goods that fell off the back of the delivery truck, and sit here in the rain trying to dream about the Caribbean.