Blue Field(10)

Nausea swelled Marilyn’s gut like something grappling to get out. Two intense years of diving told her she just needed to get down fast, beneath the surface commotion, beneath the waves. So she opened her mouth to the scouring wind, stalked forward and dug the ring from her friend’s fist.

That was yesterday, Marilyn said.

Hey, Jane said, shaking her fingers. I’m not the enemy. Remember?

First one in, Marilyn hung. Alien, aquanaut—trussed and bound, packed tip to toe into a sealed drysuit. Hoses from her tanks tentacled around her and a nylon harness cradled her chest and hips and crotch and cupped her buoyancy device to her back like wings. Above, wave-stitched seams. Below, mud. Rising from that mud, the wreck, a chance to commune with a hulking carcass of wood and steel. But here, twenty feet beneath the surface in a pewter-tinted corona of visibility that extended maybe thirty feet in all directions before blurring like smoke—thirty-foot viz—just water, water, everywhere. Freshwater. Middle of the north channel between two great northern lakes. Marilyn tightened her grip on the derricking down-line. It tethered the floating buoy—to which the converted fishing tug was tied—to a concrete plug sunk in the muck next to the busted freighter. She took it on faith that the boat with the other divers and crew remained where she left it, that the wreck she’d dived as recently as yesterday with Jane remained. Marilyn closed her eyes, worked out a hitch in her breathing. God forbid she ever keep Rand waiting. She opened her eyes again. The underside of waves a shimmering twill.

He came at her from above, a hooded figure descending in a brocade of bubbles. But when he arrived it was fast and hard with a bang to her shoulder, growling through his regulator. Then he was gone. Monkeyf*ck. She caught herself and carefully tilted. His ascending breath reached her like the detached bones of a beckoning hand. A bell chimed in her head. Going down?

She fell. Immense pressure. Her suit squeezed like a pelt. She swallowed compulsively as if hiccupping and her ears popped as she struck through strata of increasingly frigid temps like walls of frost. Not falling—winging through the thermoclines and thickening blackness while the down-line slid in measured increments through her glove. At seventy feet the dark mushroomed. She slowed and unhooked the head of her powerful main light from her harness and with a twist of the handle the beam swept on. Below and beyond, faintly illumined cumulous wisped through inky fields.

Ninety-seven feet according to her wrist-mounted, LED-lit computer. End of the line. Fog—her brain on the nitrogen from her increasingly pressurized air. She peered through the haze and soon spied the second rope. It slanted off the main line into mist. She followed the new rope’s slow rise and soon the outline of a railing materialized—and Rand. Glowering? His dim shape seemed to resolve with that of the ship, as if both were composed of the bottom’s endless silt. She swam toward him. At the railing she hovered, rechecked her pressure gage and computer. She recalled the location of her back-up regulator and secondary computer, the duplicate mask, bezel watch and laminated decompression tables stored in a zippered pouch on her waistband, mentally summoned the ship’s schematics, which she’d studied this past summer. She was here—upper level of the port-side bow. As if flipping a switch, the sequence of cognitive tasks snapped her synapses back on. She flooded alert. The cove of brightness extended as far as the lights she and Rand shone. She made eye contact with him and he nodded and in a freeing aphasia they began their flyover.

They glided over the ship’s broad deck. The colossal windless, the anchor chains like giant steel-forged braids disappearing into the hawse pipes. The starboard railing. Further aft, toward the downward-sloping stern where the lakebed plunged deeper, the open windows of the forecabins. Here she slowed and swung her beacon. He pulled alongside. What? She spotlit her palm, vertical now and facing out. Wait. She pointed a finger to her mask. Watch. Humour me, hard-ass. She dropped over the hull and descended ten, fifteen feet and then scanned upward. No luck. No money shot—a view of the massif silhouetted by faint ambient light filtering from the surface. But no harm trying. So what if she’d have to deal with him post-dive. Like she’d never done that before. She stroked the vessel’s skin. Well over a century’s worth of grime membraned away and she considered the sobering development, the bitter arc—steaming along and then not. Likely scuttled—newspaper accounts of the day reported that before departing, the underfed crew hawked most of the detachables, the sinking snuffed no lives, and the First Great Depression was on, with insurance claims far more valuable than a cargo of creaky leather boots and one-inch nails few could afford. And so this commercial freighter—built in 1888 by the Globe Iron Works—ended abandoned, wrecked.

Something pulled in Marilyn like a weight. She exhaled and sank, feeling soft as pillows on a cold dark night—a sleepless night, the alone hours she sometimes missed since the shack-up, time that used to stretch to reveal her mother’s raucous nicotined laugh, father straightening the knot in a new tie and mock-demanding, Who’s your handsome papa? Now Marilyn inhaled deeply, filling her lungs, and rose along the hull toward Rand and their planned dive. Within feet though something caught her eye. Another eye, blinking. She stopped. A mud puppy maybe nine inches long—aquatic salamander uncommon though not unheard of in such cold. Little wonder, really. A wreck rebirthed as host—in no way uncommon. She drew closer to the creature. Pudgy tail barely distinguishable from attenuated legs. Sledgehammer head. Mushroomy ruff of gills. Except for that first telltale movement, the antediluvian nervous system seemed paralyzed in her light’s glare.