“If I’m right, you’ll know.”
“Wait a minute.” Al went into the bedroom, came back out working the slide of a big forty-five automatic. He inspected the clip, shoved it into the grip, handed it to Paul. “A thing like that can be right handy, hear?”
“Thanks.”
Paul carried the gear down to the Baby Barnacle. He put the stuff on the dock, unsnapped the tarp off the broad-beamed open craft, folded it on the dock.
Linda cast off the bow line, came lightly aboard. Paul got the motor going. It chuckled raggedly. He cast off the stern line, put it in reverse, and moved out into the bay clear of the dock. He turned her north, heading for the bridge and the pass through into the Atlantic.
“What am I going to do?” Linda asked. “I mean, while you’re down there.”
“Watch. And if anything comes, anything that could be Winkler’s boat or Corson coming out to investigate, take this gaff and bang it on the side of the boat below the water line. I’ll be able to hear that a long way down.”
“Is your wind good enough?”
“I think so.”
“You should have had me bring a swim suit. I’m pretty good.”
“I can manage.”
Once through the pass, he swung south outside the reef. The Baby Barnacle chugged along, solemn and seaworthy. Finally, ahead and to the right, he saw his land, saw the glint of his house in the morning sun. Some boats were far out, fishing, vague dots against the horizon. He watched for the notch in the reef. He slowed when he came to it and tried to guess the drift of wind and tide. The first time he dropped anchor, he was too far back from the estimated spot where Winkler’s boat had been. He was correct on the next try.
“Here?” she asked. “It’s close to the reef.”
“Pretty close.” He stripped down to his swimming trunks, worked his feet into the swim fins, put the mask on. It was smeared, so he moistened a cigarette, rubbed the glass with the wet tobacco, inside and out. He strapped the belt on and went over the stern and tested himself for buoyancy. He had too much lead, so he emptied four of the snap pockets. With a full breath, he sank very slowly. He broke surface and grabbed the stern of the Baby Barnacle. He said, “Watch down there for Winkler’s boat. And keep a watch on the shore for Corson. There’s a dinghy there. If he wakes up, he may try to come out.”
He took a few slow breaths, let them out, took another, turned, and swam down hard. The green color of the water deepened rapidly. The reef was jagged at his left. He knew that if he brushed against it, the coral would infect him at every scratch. The currents were tricky. At what he guessed to be forty feet, he came to flat sand bottom outside the coral reef. He flapped the swim fins and moved across the sand toward the reef. His chest tightened, and he released some air. When his throat began to work convulsively, he braced his feet, sprang upward and swam hard, looking up to be sure he didn’t come up under the Baby Barnacle. He came up forty feet away and swam wearily to the stern.
“Nothing that trip,” he gasped, and shoved the mask up. He clung there until his breathing quieted.
He went down again, and again he saw nothing. She watched him with concern as he clung to the stern of the boat. “This time,” she said with artificial cheer.
He went down again and saw nothing. On the way up, as he peered up through the lightening green of the water, he saw a line that stretched up from the bottom. He swam to it, worked his way up it. It was fastened to a red buoy suspended a good eight feet below the surface.
Paul surfaced over the buoy, marked the position of the boat, and swam to it. He said pantingly, holding onto the transom, “Pay out a little more anchor line. Got to let out about fifteen feet.”
“Have you got something?”
“I think so.”
She let out the line, and he told her to stop when he could see the faint gleam of the red buoy directly below him.
“Shouldn’t you rest a little longer?”
“I’m okay. This is taking longer than I thought.”
He surface-dived, found the line, followed it down. It passed through a bolt set in a gallon tin of concrete and stretched from the ringbolt toward the reef itself. He followed it and found that the end was fastened to another ringbolt driven into a crevice in the coral. There was a definite overhang to the reef there, so that, holding the ringbolt, he was in a big shallow cave in the side of the reef. There was a wide shallow depression in the sand. He saw the huge rotting timbers, lime encrusted, worm-eaten, still hinting of the shape of an ancient ship. He saw the digging tools, clumsily lashed to the coral, saw the wire screen on the anchored frame, saw the pry bar, the chunks of coral that had been prized away. He saw it and knew that it was enough, and knew that he was near the limit of his endurance. He knew he had to swim out before starting up. The coral would cut like knives.
He floated down onto his hands and knees on the sand and began to dig in the loose sand. And then he knew at once that he had waited too long. His chest began to heave with the convulsive effort to breathe against the closed throat. He thrust hard with his legs, slanting up and out of the shallow cave. But the surface was too far away, and he knew that his throat would open. He released the snap of the weighted belt and then, in a dim and dreamlike state, made listless motions of swimming, moving slowly upward through the paler green of the water as he neared the surface. Water was solid in his throat, and he felt the sun and air on his face as he surfaced, and turned slowly so that his face was under once again, and the green water world was something going away from him very fast, like something seen from the observation platform of a train.
Paul felt a mild annoyance as he was grasped and turned. He wanted to protest, but he coughed, gagged.
She took his hand and lifted it and put it on the transom and folded his fingers over the warm wood and said in his ear, her voice coming from far away, “Hold on, Paul! Hold tight for just a minute.”
He clung there, blinded by coughing, vaguely aware that she had climbed into the boat, that she knelt, dripping in the soaked cotton dress, holding his wrists. She stood up and pulled hard. The transom edge scraped his chest, then cut across his middle. She grabbed the back of the belt of his swimming trunks and tumbled him awkwardly the rest of the way in. He coughed water out of his lungs, sourly.
Finally he could sit up. The whole world looked bright and new and freshly scrubbed after the dimness.
“Thanks. I—”
“Not twice, Paul. Not two of you. I couldn’t stand that.” Her voice was low and shaken, and her gray eyes were wide. The soft brown hair was plastered flat to her head, the sun-bleached streaks darkened by the water. The soaked dress displayed the woman-lines of her, the strong body, the young sturdiness.
One had drowned, he thought, and one had not. One had dived or fallen from the reef. There were no rocks farther in than the reef. It was all flat sand. Some uncertainty nibbled at a back edge of his mind. Broken chunks of coral down there in the green depths. A man who had watched too often and learned too much. Tracks that led into the water and did not—
“Linda!”
“What, Paul? What’s the matter?”
“Linda, those footprints your husband made going into the water. Bare footprints, weren’t they?”
“Why, yes, of course. I don’t know what—” And he saw her face change, saw her turn her head and look at the reef. He did not have to turn to see what she saw, the waves hissing and breaking to whiteness on that cruel surface that would have slashed bare feet to bloody tatters in seconds. And with an incoming tide, he couldn’t have been hurled against the reef while swimming, not if he had never crossed it. And it had been one of those calm gray mornings...