Stefan and Roberto joined the group with some whoops to announce their presence. The group’s objections were duly noted and rejected, and off they all went, skimming up block after block with the tide’s rise, jockeying for position on the surges, doing spinners if possible, curb turns, stepping off if necessary, even falling from time to time. Which could be painful, as the water was never deep enough to keep you from hitting asphalt, although even four inches could cushion the blow, especially if you trusted the water and pancaked on it.
Then also Sixth was flat enough across the top of the intertidal, especially between Thirty-seventh and Forty-first, that the last surges of a good flood tide could carry you in a single shot all the way up to the high tide mark, where the asphalt, though cracked and worn, returned to being mostly black rather than mostly green. The intertidal always tended to be green. Life! Life liked the intertidal.
It was fantastic to feel the resistance of water getting squished between your board and the street, a sensation that was perfectly tangible underfoot, so much so that you could shift your weight just a tiny bit, using the most exquisite precision, and cause the board to shoot forward over the water, keeping it from touching the street by margins ever so small; a tenth of an inch off the street and you were still frictionless! If you didn’t pearl the world was a whirl! And if you did bottom out you just ran off the board, turned and caught it before it barked your ankles, threw it ahead of you and ran and jumped on it again, nailing the landing just right to press straight down on the board, and off you went again!
It was also very cool, if you stuck around till the start of the ebb, to see the water run back down the street. You couldn’t ride it, that didn’t really work, though diehards always tried; but it was great just to sit there in the street, wasted and glowing in your wetsuit, and watch the water just run away, sucking down the street as if Mother Ocean had breathed in deep or was prepping some gnarly tsunami. Seemed at that moment like the whole world might dry out right before their eyes. But no, just the ordinary tidal suck, it would stabilize again down near Thirty-first, the low tide line, beyond which you had the true lower Manhattan, the submerged zone, their home waters. Their town.
Great fun all around! Afterward they pulled off Ernesto’s ratty old wetsuits and sprayed each other down first with bleach, then with some water drained through a jumbo lifestraw, after which they toweled off shivering and wincing at their cuts, which were almost sure to get a little infected. Then they thanked Ernesto as they returned his stuff, promising to make some deliveries for him later. Lot of verbosity with the other regular skimmers who stashed at Ernesto’s; there weren’t that many of them, because the falls could be just a little too brutal. So it was a tight group, one of the many small subcultures in this most clubbish of cities.
When they were dried and dressed and had wolfed down some day-old rolls Ernesto had knuckleballed at them, they walked west on plank-and-cinder-block sidewalks to Eighth, into the maze of drowned Chelsea.
Here almost every building that had not collapsed had been condemned, and rightfully so. When in spate the Hudson tended to run hard though this neighborhood, and the foundations here were not set on bedrock. Concrete turned out to be quite friable over the long haul, and while steel was stronger, it was usually set in concrete, so rusty or strong, it became irrelevant as its moorings crumbled. Once a state law had been passed condemning the whole neighborhood, Mr. Hexter had said, but naturally people had ignored the law and squatted here as much as anywhere else. It was just that the law was probably right.
So the neighborhood was quiet. They made their way on planks set on cinder blocks to a rude stoopdock, consisting of planks nailed on top of pallet-sized blocks of old Styrofoam, tied in front of a low brownstone on Twenty-ninth. There was no one in sight, which was weird to see. Without intending to they lowered their voices. All the buildings in sight had windows broken, and only some of those were boarded up; many were empty holes, generally a reliable sign of abandonment. There was not a single unbroken glass window to be seen. It was quiet enough that you could clearly hear the slop of waves against walls and the hiss of bubbles bursting, all filling the air with a susurrus that was strangely pleasant to hear, compared to the city’s usual honk and wail.
The two boys looked around to see if anyone was watching. Still no one. They ducked into the brownstone’s open door and made their way up a moldy battered staircase.
Fifth-floor walk-up. Floorboards creaking underfoot. Smell of mildew and mold and unemptied chamber pots. “Essence of New York,” Roberto noted as they shuffled down the dark hallway to the end door. They knocked on it using the old man’s code for his friends, and waited. Around them the building creaked and reeked.
The door opened and the wizened face of their friend peered up at them.
“Ah, gentlemen,” the man said. “Come in. Thanks for dropping by.”
They entered his apartment, which smelled less than the hallway but inevitably did smell. Quite a bit, actually. The old man had long since gotten used to it, they assumed. His room was very shabby, and crowded with books and boxes filled with clothing and crap, but it was orderly for all that. The piles of books were everywhere, often to head height or above it, but they all were foursquare piles, with the biggest books at the bottom, and all the spines facing out for easy reference. Several battery and oil lanterns perched on these stacks. Cabinets had drawers that they knew were full of rolled and folded maps, and the room was dominated by a big cubical map cabinet, chest high. A sink in the corner had a bulb of water draining down through a jumbo lifestraw into a bowl resting in the sink.
The old man knew where everything was and could go to anything he wanted without hesitation. He did sometimes ask them for help in moving books, to get to a large one at the bottom of a pile, but the boys were happy to oblige. The old man had more books than anyone they knew, more in fact than the total of all the other books they had ever seen. Stefan and Roberto didn’t like to talk about this, but neither of them could read. They therefore liked the maps most.
“Have a seat, gentlemen. Would you like some tea? What brings you here today?”
“We found it,” Roberto said.
The old man straightened up, looked at them. “Truly?”
“We think we did,” Stefan said. “There was a big hit on the metal detector, right at the GPS spot you gave us. Then we had to leave, but we marked the spot, and we’ll be able to find it again.”
“Wonderful,” the old man said. “The signal was strong?”
“It was pinging like crazy,” Roberto said. “And the detector was set for gold.”
“Right under the GPS spot?”
“Right under it.”
“Wonderful. Marvelous.”
“But the thing is, how deep could it be down?” Stefan asked. “How deep will we have to dig?”
The old man shrugged, frowned. His face made him look like a child with some kind of wasting disease. “How far down can the metal detector detect?”
“They say ten meters, but it depends on how much metal, and how wet the ground is, and things like that.”
He nodded. “Well, it could be that deep.” He limped over to his map cabinet and pulled out a folded map. “Here, look at this.”