The Passenger (The Passenger, #1)(5)

Choice is the name you give to what you got.

Stop quoting me.

You dont want to talk to me.

No.

Anything at all here? Any last words of advice for the living?

Yes. Dont.

Jesus. That’s cold.

Let’s just turn out the lights and call it a life.

We’ll miss you.

Will you miss yourself?

We’ll be around. There’s always work to be done.

He looked a bit slumpshouldered standing there but he roused himself. Okay, he said. If that’s it that’s it. I can take a hint.

He folded one flipper across his small paunch and made a sort of bow and then he was gone. She pulled the covers over her head. Then she heard the door open again. When she looked the Kid had come in once more and he stepped quietly to the center of the room and hefted the canebottomed chair by one slat and shouldered it and turned and went out and pulled the door shut after him.



* * *



—

She slept and sleeping she dreamt that she was running after a train with her brother running along the cinderpath and in the morning she put that in her letter. We were running after the train Bobby and it was drawing away from us into the night and the lights were dimming away in the darkness and we were stumbling along the track and I wanted to stop but you took my hand and in the dream we knew that we had to keep the train in sight or we would lose it. That following the track would not help us. We were holding hands and we were running and then I woke up and it was day.





He sat wrapped in one of the gray rescue blankets from the emergency bag and drank hot tea. The dark sea lapped about. The Coast Guard boat that had pulled up a hundred yards off sat rocking in the swells with the running lights on and beyond that ten miles to the north you could see the lights of trucks moving along the causeway, coming out of New Orleans and heading east along US 90 toward Pass Christian, Biloxi, Mobile. Mozart’s second violin concerto was playing on the tapedeck. The air temperature was forty-four degrees and it was three seventeen in the morning.

The tender was lying on his elbows with the headset on watching the dark water beneath them. From time to time the sea would flare with a soft sulphurous light where forty feet down Oiler was working with the cuttingtorch. Western watched the tender and he blew on the tea and sipped it and he watched the lights moving along the causeway like the slow cellular crawl of waterdrops on a wire. Strobing faintly where they passed behind the concrete balusters. There was an onshore wind coming up past the western tip of Cat Island and there was a light chop to the water. Smell of oil and the rich tidal funk of mangrove and saltgrass from the islands. The tender sat up and took off the headset and began to rifle through the toolbox.

How’s he doing?

Doin okay.

What’s he want?

The big sidecutters.

He hooked a set of shears to a carabiner and snapped the carabiner over the workline and watched the shears slide into the sea. He looked at Western.

How deep can you use acetylene?

Thirty, thirty-five feet.

And after that it’s oxyarc.

Yes.

The tender nodded and pulled the headset back on.

Western drained the last of the tea and shook out the dregs and put the cup back in his bag and reached and got his flippers and pulled them on. He slipped the blanket from his shoulders and stood and zipped up the jacket of his wetsuit and bent and got his tanks and lifted them by the straps and pulled them on. He fastened the straps and pulled on his mask.

The tender slid the headset back. You care if I change stations?

Western lifted the mask up. It’s a tape.

You care if I change tapes?

No.

The tender shook his head. Helicopter us out here in the freezing-ass cold at one oclock in the morning. I dont know what the hurry was.

Meaning that they’re all dead.

Yeah.

And you know this how?

It just stands to reason.

Western looked out at the Coast Guard boat. The shape of the lights unchained in the chop of the dark water. He looked at the tender. Reason, he said. Right.

He pulled on his gloves. The white beam of the spotlight raced over the water and back again and then went dark. He pulled on his belt and hooked it and fitted the regulator into his mouth and pulled down the mask and stepped into the water.

Dropping slowly through the dark toward the intermittent flare of the torch below. He reached the stabilizer and dropped down onto the fuselage and turned and swam slowly along, tracing the smooth aluminum under his gloved hand. The bead of the rivets. The torch flared again. The shape of the fuselage tunneling off into the dark. He kicked past the hulking nacelles that held the turbofan engines and dropped down the side of the fuselage and into the pool of light.

Oiler had cut away the latching mechanism and the door stood open. He was just inside the plane crouched against the bulkhead. He gestured with his head and Western pulled up in the door and Oiler shone his light down the aircraft aisle. The people sitting in their seats, their hair floating. Their mouths open, their eyes devoid of speculation. The workbasket was sitting on the floor inside the door and Western reached and got the other divelight and pulled himself into the plane.

He kicked his way slowly down the aisle above the seats, his tanks dragging overhead. The faces of the dead inches away. Everything that could float was against the ceiling. Pencils, cushions, styrofoam coffeecups. Sheets of paper with the ink draining off into hieroglyphic smears. A tightening claustrophobia. He doubled under and got himself turned around and made his way back.