"Percy said it had teeth like a shark and a hide like a rhinoceros," Quiston recalled. "But he's probably just fooling."
"Percy's never had a reputation for reliability."
We squinted at the water for his signal. Nothing but the chromium undulation. Quiston squeezed my hand. At length Percy spurted to the surface again.
"Must be deeper… than I thought," he puffed, crawling ashore.
"It's a deep pond, Percy."
"I knew you were fooling," Quiston claimed, relieved.
Percy flushed red and thrust a fist under Quiston's nose.
"Listen you, you see this? Mess with the Perce, go home in a hearse!"
"Take it easy, Perce. Forget it. Why don't you kids go down to the shallow end hunt some tadpoles?"
"Yeah, that's it!" Quiston had never been greatly fond of this dark water by the pumphouse anyway, even without monsters. "Tadpoles in the cattails!"
"I'm not after tadpoles." Percy said and fumed back up the ladder. He snatched off his goggles and flung them away as though they had been the trouble. He drew a great breath and dived.
The water pitched, oscillated, slowed, and stilled. I began to worry. I climbed up the ladder, hoping to decrease the angle. Impervious as rolled steel. Quiston called up at me: "Dad…?" I watched the water. Percy didn't come up. I was just about to dive in after him when I saw his face part the surface.
He lay back treading water for a long while before he paddled for shore.
"Never mind, Percy," Quiston called. "I believe you. We believe you, don't we, Dad?"
"Sure. It could have been anything – a sunken branch, that deck chair Caleb threw in last fall…
Percy refused Quiston's offered hand and pulled himself up the muddy bank to the grass. "It wasn't any branch. Wasn't any chair. Maybe it wasn't any monster but it wasn't any goddamn furniture either so fuck you!"
He wrapped his arms around his knees and shivered. Quiston looked up at me on the pumphouse roof.
"Okay, okay, I'll take a look," I said and both boys cheered.
I removed my watch. I tossed it to Quiston and stepped to the high edge of the pumphouse roof. I hooked my toes over the tar-papered plywood and started breathing. I could feel my blood gorging with oxygen. Old skindiver trick the kid didn't know. Also he'd been jumping too far out, hitting too flat. I would go straighter down… breathe three more, crouch low, spring as high as possible, and jackknife.
But in the middle of the leap I changed my dive.
Now I'm no diver. My only period near a diving board was the year we spent in Boyes Hot Springs while my father was stationed at Mare Island. Buddy and I were about Quiston and Percy's ages. A retired bosun friend of my dad's devoted many after-school afternoons teaching us to go off the high board. Buddy learned to do a respectable one-and-a-half. The best I could accomplish was a backward cutaway swan, where you spring up, throw your feet forward and lie backward in the air, coming past the board close with your belly. It looks more dangerous than it is. All you have to do is get far out enough.
And when I took off from the pumphouse I knew I was getting plenty far out. I was so pumped by the distance and height my wonder muscles had achieved that I couldn't help but think the future is now, and I went into my cutaway.
For the first time in more than twenty years. Yet everything was happening so helpfully slow that I had plenty of time to remember all the moves and get them correct. I lay back with a languid grace, arms spreading into the swan, chest and belly bowed to the astonished sky. It was wonderful. I could see the pigeons circling above me, cooing their admiration. I could hear the Sons of the Pioneers lope into their next ballad: "An old cowpoke went riding out…" I could feel the breeze against my neck and armpit, the sun on my thighs, smell the sizzle of the barbecue – all with a leisurely indulgence, just hanging there. Then, somewhere beneath all these earthly sensations, or beyond them, remote and at the same time disturbingly intimate, I heard the first of those other sounds that were to continue in increase all the rest of that awful afternoon and evening. It wasn't the familiar howling of decapitated brujos that you hear on peyote comedowns, nor the choiring arguments of angels and devils that LSD can provoke. Those noises are merely unearthly. These sounds were un-anythingly – the chilly hiss of decaying energy, the bleak creaking of one empty space scraping against another, the way balloons creak. Don't let it spook you, he said, ride loose and sing, so I sung to myself O listen to this entropy hiss…
And I came loose from the sky.
I tilted on backward and down, shooting past the pumphouse roof and through the seamless water. My body had become flawless, almost fictional in its perfection, like Tarzan in the old Sunday funnies with every muscle and sinew inked clean, or Doc Savage after forty years of ferocious physical training. The water sang past me, turning cold and dark. I was not alarmed. I wasn't surprised that I didn't have to swim to perpetuate my deepening plunge – the dive had been that frictionless – and I wasn't startled when my outstretched hands finally struck the jagged mystery at the pond bottom. It seemed perfectly natural that I had arrowed to the thing, like a compass needle to the pole -
"Hello, Awfulness. Sorry I can't leave you lurking here in peace, but some lesser being could get bit."
– as I grasped it by its lower jaw and turned for the surface.
I knew what it was. It was the fifty-gallon oil drum M'kehla and I had lost some half-dozen psychedelic summers before. We had been using it to cook ammonium nitrate fertilizer, piping the gas out the threaded bung through a hose down under the water so we could catch the bubbles in plastic bags. Trying to manufacture nitrous oxide. It had been an enormous hassle but had worked well enough that the whole operation – me, M'kehla, hose, barrel, and Coleman stove – had all tumbled into the water, flashing and splashing.
We saved the stove but the lid came off and the barrel went down before we could catch it. It must have landed at a slant, mouth down, because a pocket of air still remained in the corner so that it rocked there on the blind bottom, supporting itself at an angle, as if on its haunches. What I grabbed was the rusted-out rim below that corner with the air pocket.
I kicked hard, stroking one-handed for the dim green far above. I felt the thing give up its hold in the mire as brute inertia was overcome by my powerful strokes. I felt its dumb outrage at being dragged from its lair, its monstering future thwarted by a stout Tarzan heart and a Savage right hand. I felt it tug suddenly heavier as it tilted and belched out its throatful of air in protest. A lot heavier. But my inspired muscles despaired not. Stroke after stroke; I pulled the accursed thing toward the light. Upward and upward. And upward.
Until that stout heart was pounding the walls in panic, and that Savage right hand no longer held the thing; the thing held the hand.
That discharge of its buoyant bubble had jerked the rusty teeth deep into my palm. To turn it loose without first setting it down would mean letting those teeth rake their way out. All I could do was stroke and kick and hold my own, and listen to that alarm pound louder and louder.