Next morning, dull-eyed and slick-tailed, we drove out to the Sixties Nest, ready to deliver our news.
Chapter 18
After we told them what we found, it took two days to get everything together, make a few plans. They gathered up chainsaws and axes and brush knives and an aluminum boat, and somehow Howard talked his boss into letting him borrow the wrecker for a Sunday afternoon.
His boss must have found him considerably more charming than Leonard and I did. At my worst, I wouldn't have pissed on him had he been on fire, and at my best, I would have stomped the flames out.
So we went down there on a cold-as-hell Sunday, the sky all funny-looking and threatening rain, and we took the tools and cut a path for the wrecker to get down to the creek bank. It wasn't much of a path, but by cutting a tree now and then and chopping out some undergrowth, the wrecker, one of those big things with monster tires, was able to get through. We put out a few fishing poles here and there as a disguise, but I thought that was damn silly. Anyone came along and saw all the work we'd done to get that wrecker in, saw our wet suits, and believed we were just dropping a few lines off cane poles was going to have to be a lot dumber than a stone.
Still, that's what we did. All of us but Paco. He was gone as he often was, and nobody offered an explanation, and I couldn't have cared less.
I girded my loins and prepared to put on the dry suit. I didn't want to go back down there, but I knew if I didn't, Leonard would, and I couldn't let him do it just because I was a chickenshit. Not that I hadn't considered it. He offered, and it was tempting, but I made it clear the first round was my baby. My dad always said that if something scared you, thing to do was to face it head-on. Saved yourself a lot of sleepless nights that way. Course, it was an attitude that might get you killed. I wondered if dear old Dad had considered that possibility.
I rubbed myself down with the grease and pulled on the suit and took hold of the wrecker's hook and cable and went down to the edge of the water.
Leonard came over, said, "Sure you want to do this?"
"Course not."
"But you're gonna?"
"Yep."
"Get in any kind of trouble, I'll come get you."
"How you going to know if I'm in trouble?"
"I won't let you stay down long, oxygen tanks or not. You don't come up pretty quick, I'll go down there and get your ass."
"I know that's your favorite part, Leonard, but bring the rest of me up with it.''
"Deal."
I pulled the mask down and Howard let out some slack on the cable. I went into the water, swam directly toward the suck hole. It obliged by dragging at me, and I went with it. It was as dark as before down there, and just as cold, and I had to work not to get tangled in the cable. A mild feeling of panic moved over me, but I put my mind on my business and swam with the current. It wasn't as bad this time. I could feel the pressure of the cold against me, but I must have gotten myself greased better this time or my suit put on tighter, because no water was seeping in.
When I was in the suck hole, I turned with my feet up and felt to see what had given up the license plate. It sure felt like a car bumper. I ran my gloved hands over it some more. Yes sir, what we had here was a genuine automobile. I got the hook attached by feel, hoped it was secure, grabbed the cable, and followed it up rapidly. I took only a few seconds, but when I broke the surface, I felt as if I had been down forever.
Howard got the winch going. It whined and pulled taut, paused, started whining again. Before long our catch broke the surface. I couldn't tell what color it had once been, because it had long since adopted the gray and green of the creek bottom's mud and mold. The rear window was mostly busted out, and what glass was there was flimsy-looking, as if it were not glass at all, but crinkled plastic. The tires looked like black chamois rags wrapped around the wheels. The windows were down, to help it sink no doubt, and water and mud the texture of a sick man's shit rushed out of them.
When it was on the bank, we gathered around it.
"It's a car," Howard said, "but is it the right car?"
"Softboy said he had some partners," I said. "Check for bones."
Time and fish would have long since taken care of any bodies in the car. Bones might have washed off or been carried away by larger fish, but if the car had gone into that suck hole and lodged there early on, just maybe they had been preserved. And if not, there might be some other evidence there that would tie the car to Softboy.
The doors wouldn't open, so Howard got a bar and went to work. When he popped them, mud oozed out. Trudy and Howard got shovels and started scraping. It wasn't too long before Howard found a skull. It was caked with mud and slime. He wiped it on his sleeve until we could see that it had a large hole in the left side and a smaller one in the right.
Trudy dug around in the backseat until she came up with another mud-covered skull. She brought it out on her shovel and Howard took hold of it and scrubbed it with his sleeve. This one had a small hole in the forehead, and at the back, one the size of a fist.
"I got a feeling Softboy lied about his partners," Leonard said. "Those are close-up shots. Small one's the entry wound, big one's the exit. I think he finished them himself. Money'll make you do things."
"He didn't seem that way," Howard said.
"Well, things aren't always what they seem," Leonard said.
"One thing, though," Howard said. "He told the truth about the car. And you know what that could mean."
We had the fever then. I tried to figure where Softboy might have wrecked the boat, and decided the best thing to do was to check both sides of the bridge in the deeper water, see What we could come up with. Leonard and I took turns going in. It was surprisingly deep on either side of the bridge and I thought maybe they had dredged there, preparing to dig the great waterway that never happened.
We swam along the bottom, and at first we panicked at everything we touched. Some of it was the usual garbage: cans and bottles and plastic containers that had once housed soaps or colas, all manner of crap that belonged at the dump and not in the water. Sometimes there were big things and we hooked the winch cable to them and Howard hauled them out. There were a number of fifty-five-gallon drums full of who knows what, and tires and wheels, the occasional transmission or lawn mower, and of course the ever popular irregular-shaped rock.
No boats. No pieces of boat.
I was less fearful of the water now, and I tried to keep that in mind. Overconfidence is the way to give your soul to the devil an inch at a time. The dry suit was pinching me some. Water was starring to seep in, and I could really feel the cold. We dove and we dove, and by late afternoon I was exhausted.
We had found neither money nor boat nor boat pieces, and Leonard and I came out of the water and out of our drippy suits and dressed in our clothes for a little warmth and a break. Paco showed up with sandwiches and coffee, and he and Howard went off down the bank to talk about something or another.
The money fever was fading. I thought about how long ago the boat had gone down, and all that could have happened to it over the years, and a mild depression moved in. If it had broken up when it wrecked, it might have gradually been carried away, and the money with it. It could have long since made the sea.
Trudy had been ignoring me. She was about her business of sorting through the junk we'd pulled up, hoping to find some overlooked fragment that might resemble a boat. I couldn't help but watch her, way she moved was tantalizing.
There was this mound of dirt and vines and scraggly growth not far from the water's edge, and she took a break and went to lean on it, and the way she leaned, with her pelvis thrust forward, put a pain in both my heart and my groin. And I think she damn well knew it.