Weir shook his head. “You know what your trouble is, Brian? You’re an amateur.”
Dennison smiled, a little sickly. “We’ll see.”
When Jim got into the truck, Raymond was already there, his gaze flattened against the misty windshield. “It’s okay. Maybe it’s better if I don’t believe anymore that I put an angel in the ground today. Maybe it’s better if she didn’t have my child, that she was a fuckup sometimes like everybody else.”
Weir was quiet for a moment. “This may not hold much water, but that last night I saw her at the Whale, her eyes lit up when she talked about you. She wanted to call you right then, let you know I was back. You were the first thing she thought about. I think she died loving you Ray, no matter what was going on at the end.”
Raymond nodded. “Yeah. Sure. Thanks.”
Going over the bay bridge, Jim looked out to the fog-muted lights of the restaurants, the hushed spring calm of preseason Newport. The air was rank as they dropped onto the peninsula. A Newport Beach cop unit pulled in behind them and trailed along.
Raymond sat up straight, looked over at Jim, then out the window. He started drumming his fingers on the armrest, looked over at Weir again.
“What?” Jim asked.
“I want to go in the water, deep. I want to do it now.”
“Can’t see much at night, Ray.”
“I don’t want to see. I want to not see.”
Jim drove on for a while. “Okay.”
They got one of Virginia’s rental boats from Poon’s Locker and took her down to Laguna. It was a nice little Whaler with a 35hp Yamaha on it. Weir could barely see the houselights in the fog. They anchored off of Moss Point and geared up. Jim found some glow sticks in his dive bag, and hooked one to Ray’s vest and one to his own. He checked the light batteries and water seaclass="underline" okay. Night dives were always a little strange, and Raymond wasn’t used to them.
“Follow me down,” said Jim.
“How deep is it here?”
“Sixty. There’s the eighty-foot wall about fifty yards out, but we’re not going down it. Stay above sixty.”
They put on their masks, traded thumbs-ups, and spilled over.
The cold water filled Jim’s wet suit as soon was he was under. It was a chilling, sobering cold, one that erases clutter from the mind. He knew what Ray was after. His regulator drew easily and he dropped to ten feet, looking upward through his bubbles to watch Ray descending, his glow stick burning bright green against the darkness.
Weir found the anchor line, turned on his light, and motioned Raymond down. The visibility at forty feet was almost niclass="underline" There was only the beam of light on the pale rope of the anchor line, the luminescent rise of bubbles, and Raymond’s glow stick ten feet above him. The pressure mounted and Jim cleared his ears.
As he slowly descended, Jim felt the strange ebb of reality that always hit him when he was under, that replacement of the old order with a new one. Down here was the alternate world, governed by alternate law and principle. Down here, you were smaller, disenfranchised, considerably lower on the food chain.
Raymond joined him at the anchor. Jim’s depth gauge said seventy feet. He knew where the wall was, but Raymond was in no condition for the wall; not tonight — maybe not ever.
They traded okays again. Through the glass of Raymond’s mask, Jim could see his eyes — wide and a little frightened. Raymond was working hard to stay down. Like a lot of people, he left too much air in his vest, as if that little extra would give them a head start on their way through seventy feet of water. Jim reached out and hit the deflate button on Ray’s compensator. Raymond settled comfortably down beside him. Jim pointed to the rocks and Ray nodded.
Night is day for most creatures of the sea, Weir thought. They feed, travel, mate by night; the corals bloom and the anemones open; a rock outcropping that looks abandoned by day will brighten and bloom and teem with life in the darkness. Jim floated over the rocks, watching his flashlight beam. A garibaldi, bright as an orange, perused him from beside a round tan stone. A halibut wavered along the sand, its two eyes shifting alertly in Weir’s light. Jim could see the antennae of a lobster in the deep crack between two rocks. The sea grass wavered in the current, blown left then right by a breeze of water. Two silver mackerel streaked by. Jim looked behind him. Ray had fallen back twenty feet. Okay, he thought, Ray is going to be okay. The suctioned tentacle of a big octopus swirled behind a rock. Jim swam over and picked up the creature in his light. The sand was settling where the octopus had squeezed under the rock, but he couldn’t get all the way in. Three tentacles still wavered, rippling outward like whips cracked in slow motion. Jim pulled him out, felt the surprising strength of it, let go, and watched as it convulsed, hovered, then shot away from him toward the larger rocks. What an unlikely grace, he thought.
He felt the current pushing him to and fro, like the sea grass. He’d found that if you let go and let it take you, it was easy and natural, as if the currents around you and the currents inside you were the same. When you fought it was when you got into trouble, when you’d understand its ceaseless, unresistible power. That was what Raymond had to do with the current, he thought, with the current and everything else in his life. Go with it some. Don’t fight every inch of the way. It was going to take time.
He checked his air and depth and watch. Just ten minutes down. He felt good.
When he turned to see how Ray was doing, Ray was gone.
He stopped, running his light beam through the congested deep. He backtracked, swinging the light in front of him. The beam looked like a white rope for a few feet, then it frayed and dulled into darkness. He found the anchor line, but no Ray. On the surface, he tread water until he found the Whaler, which had swung north and west with the swell. The lantern glowed from the aft bench of the boat, but Ray wasn’t on it. Jim understood in a flash that Raymond had gone to the wall.
He headed back down, along the rope, then swam west toward the open sea. The wall — more of a trench — was an almost vertical drop of eighty feet that formed a valley before rising almost as sharply on the far side. When he got to the drop, Jim floated out over it. In good water, you always got a little jolt of vertigo when you did this, the sudden fear that you were about to fall straight down for eighty feet. But you didn’t. You hovered there, pinned to the sea, viewing the bottom below. It was like flying.
He could see Raymond’s glow stick descending. His depth gauge said seventy-five feet. His tank had 1,700 psi of air. Ray would be using his air faster, breathing hard. Jim felt the anger gnawing at him: Divers didn’t just leave each other and head out on their own — not at night. There were reasons, and the reasons had to do with yourself: What if your regulator clogged, your mask shield popped out, your tank strap got caught on a rock, your legs cramped? What if you just got lost?
Jim closed the distance, kicking steadily and strongly. The pressure squeezed in on his aching ribs. At one hundred feet, Ray was still ten yards ahead. Jim felt the first subversive lightness of the nitrogen buildup in his blood, brought on by pressure. Some people called it rapture of the deep. It made you loosen up, forget, take chances, get playful — all the wrong attitudes at depth. It was a hazard, and a good diver never forgot how dangerous it could be.
He caught Raymond at 150 feet, took his swim fin and pulled him back. Ray swung around lazily, smiled, offered the okay sign. Jim shook his head, thinking it isn’t okay at 150 feet, you fool — it’s too deep, too cold, too dark, and too far from the boat. Now we’ll have to decompress on the way up — five intervals, three minutes each, starting at one hundred feet. That was fifteen extra minutes of cold, wasted energy, air. Jim hooked his thumb toward the surface, twice. Ray nodded, started up, then dolphin-dove and reversed direction, heading down again. Weir caught him by his ankle. Then he took Raymond’s vest in his right hand and shook him. Ray was smiling again, drunk on the nitrogen and wanting to get drunker. Jim took Ray’s chin in his hand, straightened it, and forced Ray to look at him. He wasn’t smiling now, but he looked at Jim with a woozy expression containing something that sent a genuine shiver of fear up Weir’s back. It was a look of defeat. Ray was moving toward the ultimate surrender.