“Wait a second!” Doug stared around; all he needed was half a minute, less, he was sure of it. “Your hair’s stuck!” he announced, leaning his weight back down on her, lowering his face beside hers as though to help. “Stuck in this buckle here, be careful, you’ll h-h-h-hurt yourself, I’ll just get it-it-it-it loose, and you’re all-l-l-l-l-l-l, oh, buhbuhbuhbuh, AH!”
When the shivering stopped, he raised himself onto his elbows again, grinned down into her skeptical eyes, and said, “There. It’s loose now.”
He rolled off her, and they both sat up in the sunlight, Doug looking off toward the distant shore of Long Island, out across the Great South Bay, as Judy said caustically, “Are you satisfied now?”
“If you are, Judy,” he told her, grinning, not giving a shit anymore. “You’re paying for the lessons.”
She was. Judy was the wife of an ophthalmologist in Syosset, and this was the third year she’d come to Doug for diving lessons. All kinds of diving lessons. Each May first she’d appear, regular as clockwork, and would help pay his rent and divert his hours three days a week until the fifteenth of July, when she and her husband would go off for their month on St. Croix.
She was a good-looking woman in her late thirties, Judy, whose hard body was severely kept in trim with aerobics, jogging, Nautilus machines, and pitiless diets. The ruthlessness showed in her face, though, in the sharpness of her nose and the coldness of her dark eyes and the thinness of her lips, so it was unlikely anyone other than the ophthalmologist—who had no choice—would have willingly hung out with her over an extended period without something more than her companionship to be gotten out of it. Who salted her restless tail the rest of the year Doug had no idea, but his annual two-and-a-half months of the pleasure of her company was just about all he’d be able to stand.
May was still a little early for most water traffic on the bay, especially in midweek, except for the ubiquitous clammers and the occasional ferries over to Fire Island. It was easy at this time of year to find an anchorage in the shallow water of the bay away from other boaters, dive a bit, screw a bit, and thus while away the two hours of each lesson. Doug would have been happy to give her extra time today for free, since he had nothing else at all on his plate this afternoon, but, as usual, Judy’s self-maintenance program came first. Leg waxing. Right.
Doug started the motor and steered the small boat toward Islip, soon making out his own shack and dock straight ahead. Judy wasn’t much given to small talk, particularly over the roar of a 235 horse Johnson outboard, so they rode in silence—not particularly companionable—all the way to shore, and were almost there when Doug spotted, beyond the shack, a silver Jaguar V12 in his parking area, next to Judy’s black Porsche.
A customer! And a rich one, at that, judging from the car. So Judy’s wax job was a blessing in disguise, after all, and Doug was feeling almost kindly toward the bitch as he tied up at his dock and offered his hand to help her ashore. “See you Wednesday,” he said, smiling his professional smile.
“Mm,” she said, already thinking of other things. Off she marched while Doug finished tying up and removed the spent tanks from the boat.
She was already gone, in a cloud of dust, when Doug walked around to the front of the shack and looked at the two customers he’d least expected ever to see again. And particularly driving a car like that Jag.
Oh; MD plates.
“There you are,” said Andy.
John pointed accusingly at the door. “Your note says back by three.”
“And here I am,” Doug said as he unlocked his shop door. Leading the way inside, he said, “You two decided not to make the dive?”
“Oh, we made it,” John said, sounding disgusted, while Andy shut the door.
Doug was astonished. “You did?” He’d taken it for granted these two, no matter how much expert professional training he’d given them, would never survive a real dive in the actual world under uncontrolled conditions. But they’d done it, by golly, and they’d lived through it.
And now what? Hoping they weren’t here to try to sell the equipment back, Doug said, “Everything worked out real good, huh?”
“Not entirely,” Andy said, with a grin and a shrug. “Unexpected little problems.”
“Turbidity,” John said, as though it were the filthiest word he knew. And maybe it was.
“Oh, turbidity,” Doug said, nodding, seeing the problem now, saying, “I’m a saltwater man, deep-water man, so I don’t run into that too much. But in a reservoir, sure, I suppose you would. Screwed things up, huh?”
“You sum up good,” John told him.
“If you came to me for advice,” Doug said, “I’m sorry, but I’m the wrong guy. Like I say, turbidi—”
“We already got advice,” Andy told him. “From a famous writer that’s an expert on these things. You know the big ship called the Normandie?”
“That’s not the point,” John interrupted. “The point is, we think we know how to do it right this time—”
“Go in from above,” Doug suggested. “I know that much. Take a boat out—”
“Can’t,” John said. “But we still got an idea. What we don’t got is air.”
“Ah,” Doug said. “I get it.”
“We figure,” Andy said, “you could fill our tanks just like you did last time.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Doug said, wondering how much extra he could charge.
Andy told him, “We’ll pay double, for two tanks.”
“You know,” Doug said slowly, thinking vaguely there might be something extra in this for him somewhere, “what you probably need is a pro along, somebody to deal with the problems right there, when they happen.”
“No, we don’t,” John said.
“Thanks a lot, Doug,” Andy said, grinning at him and shaking his head. “I appreciate the thought behind the offer. But we think we got it pretty well doped out this time.”
“We hope,” John said.
“We’re pretty confident,” Andy reminded his partner, and turned back to Doug to say, “So all we need is air.”
“Then that’s what you’ll get,” Doug said, but as he led the way out of the shop and around to the compressor under its shiny blue tarp on the dock behind the shack, he kept thinking, There’s got to be something in this for me. Something. For me.
FORTY-THREE
The thing is, the railroad doesn’t have handcars anymore. Those terrific old handcars with the seesaw type of double handle so one guy would push down while the other guy facing him pulled up, and then vice versa, and the handcar would go zipping along the track, that old kind of handcar that guys like Buster Keaton used to travel on, they don’t have them anymore. All the good things are gone: wood Monopoly houses, Red Ryder, handcars.
Which is why the big sixteen-wheeler that Stan Murch airbraked to a coughing stop at the railway crossing on the old road west of Vilburgtown Reservoir at one A.M. on that cloudless but moonless night did not contain a handcar. What it contained instead, in addition to diving gear and a winch and other equipment, was a weird hybrid vehicle that had mostly been, before the surgical procedures began, a 1976 American Motors Hornet. A green Hornet, in fact; so not everything is gone.
Still a two-door small car with a minimal backseat and small separate trunk (not a hatchback), this Hornet was now without engine, transmission, radiator, radio, hood, hubcaps, bumpers, head- and taillights, spare tire, windshield wipers, dashboard and roof. It still contained its steering mechanism (not power steering), brakes (ditto), seats, windshield, windows and 1981 New York State inspection sticker. It also had new axles front and back, and new wheels, the very old tires of which had been reduced to half pressure, which made it slump lower than normally to the ground, as though its transfiguration had reduced it to gloom.