Idelba led them up a metal staircase to a gap in the taffrail of the barge. From the top of the stairs they could look down into the hull of the barge and see that it was about a third full with a load of wet blond sand, a little mottled with seaweed and gray mud. Mostly it was pure wet sand. A giant tube, like a firefighter’s hose but ten times bigger around, and reinforced by internal hoops, was suspended from a crane at the far end of the barge over the open hull, and newly dredged sand, looking like wet cement, was pouring out of it into the barge. A big dull grinding roar mixed with a high whine came from the innards of the barge.
“We’re still dredging pure sand,” Idelba pointed out. “The barge is almost full. We’ll be taking this load up Ocean Parkway soon, drop the sand there at the new beach.”
“It seems like it could get a lot fuller,” Roberto said.
“True,” Idelba said. “If we were headed out to sea we could carry more, but as it is we go up canals to the high tide mark and dump it there as high as we can go, and then bulldozers will come and spread it at low tide. So we can’t ride too deep.”
“Where are you dumping it?” Vlade asked.
“Between Avenue J and Foster Avenue, these days. They tore out the ruins and bulldozed the ground. Half our sand will end up just below the low tide line, half just above. That’s the plan, anyway. Spread the sand out and hope to get some dunes at the high tide mark, and some sandbars just below the low tide mark. Those are important for catching the mulm and giving the ecosystem a chance to grow. It’s a big project, beach building. Moving sand is just part of it. In some ways it’s the easy part, although it isn’t that easy.”
“What if sea level rises again?” Stefan asked.
Idelba shrugged. “I guess they move the beach again. Or not. Meanwhile we have to act like we know what we’re doing, right?”
Vlade squinted at the sun. He had almost forgotten how Idelba said things.
“Can we go up with you and see the new beach?” Roberto asked.
“You can, but it might take too long for today. It will take a couple hours to get up Ocean Parkway, and then another couple to unload the sand. Maybe you could follow us there on your boat, then leave when you want.”
“I think we’ll have to do that some other time,” Vlade said, “or else we won’t get back to Manhattan by dinner. So, let’s tell you what we came out here for, and you can get on with your day and we can go back home.”
Idelba nodded. She had still not met Vlade’s eye, as far as he could tell. It was making him sad.
Roberto said, “You have to promise to keep this a secret.”
“Okay,” Idelba said. Now she glanced at Vlade. “I promise. And Vlade knows how well I keep my promises.”
Vlade laughed painfully at that, but when the boys looked alarmed, he said, “No, I’m just laughing because Idelba surprised me there. She’s good for it. She’ll keep our secret. That’s why I brought you to talk to her.”
“Okay then,” Roberto said. “Stefan and I are doing a little underwater archaeology in the Bronx, and we think we’ve found a, a find, that we want to dig up, but we’ve been working with just a diving bell, and we can’t do the excavation under it. We tried, but it won’t work.”
“They almost drowned,” Vlade added despite himself.
The boys nodded solemnly.
“A diving bell?” Idelba said. “Are you kidding me?”
“No, it’s really cool.”
“Really crazy, you mean. I’m amazed you’re still alive. Did you ever black out?”
“No.”
“Headaches?”
“Well, yeah. Some.”
“No lie. I used to do some of that shit too when I was your age, but I learned better when I blacked out. And I had headaches all the time. Probably lost a lot of brain cells. That’s probably why I hung out with Vlade here.”
The boys didn’t know what to make of this.
Idelba eyed them a while longer. “So it’s in the Bronx, you say?”
They nodded.
“It isn’t the Hussar, is it?”
“What!” Roberto protested. He glared at Vlade: “You told her!”
Vlade shook his head, and Idelba laughed her short harsh laugh.
“Come on, boys. No one digs up anything in the Bronx but the Hussar. You should know that. How did you decide where to dig?”
“We have this friend, an old man who studied it. He’s got a lot of maps and he’s done research in the archives.”
“He went to London.”
“That’s right, how did you know?”
“Because they all go to London. I grew up in Queens, remember?”
“Well, he went there and read the records in London, and saw the big map there and all. And he figured it out, and we went there in our boat and dove with a metal detector, a Golfier Maximus.”
“That’s a good one,” Idelba allowed.
“I didn’t know you were into this stuff,” Vlade observed.
“It was before we met.”
“When you were ten?”
“Pretty much. I played in the Queens intertidal, we did all that water rat stuff. We were the Muskrats. I nearly drowned three times. Have you guys nearly drowned yet?”
They nodded solemnly again. Vlade could see they were developing a crush on Idelba. He could relate, and was feeling sadder than ever.
“Just last week!” Roberto was explaining. “I was stuck under the bell, but Stefan got Vlade to come out and save me.”
“Good for Vlade.” A shadow passed over her face and for a second she wasn’t there with them, and Vlade knew where she was. She took a sharp breath in and said, “So you think you’ve found the Hussar.”
“Yeah, we got a giant hit.”
“A gold hit?”
“That’s right.”
“Interesting.” She regarded them, glanced again at Vlade. He couldn’t read her expression as she regarded the boys; it had been too long. “Well, I think you’re chasing a dream here, boys. But what the hell. We all do. Better than sitting around doing nothing. Now the truth is I don’t have the right equipment to help you just hanging around out here. Mainly your job is too small for my gear. We would suck your site to smithereens. What you need is like tweezers compared to this rig here, see what I mean?”
“Wow,” Stefan said.
“We get it,” Roberto said. “But you must have something for, I don’t know, detail work? Don’t you do any detail work?”
“No.”
“But you know what I mean?”
“I do. And yes, I can pull together what you need. You got the site buoyed?”
“Yes.”
“Underwater buoy?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Okay, I’ll put together a kit, and we’ll visit your site one of these days soon, and I’ll suck whatever you got out in a couple hours at the most. Suck it up and see what you got. It’ll be fun. Although you have to prepare yourself to be disappointed, understand? There’s been three hundred and whatever years of disappointment over this one, and it isn’t likely you’ll be the ones to end the streak. But we’ll suck it up and see what you got.”
“Wow,” Stefan said again. He and Roberto were both completely smitten. They were not going to remember not to be disappointed, Vlade could see. They would be crushed when they came up with nothing. But what could you do. Idelba gave him a look, a little reproving, but he could see she was thinking the same thing. You are setting these boys up for a fall, her look said, but what can you do. That’s what happens.
Yes, youth; and they were old. And when they were young they had suffered a blow, a blow so much more crushing than not finding your pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that it was beyond what these boys could conceive. And beyond what they themselves had been able to handle. So… the boys were going to be okay. Everybody was going to be okay compared to Vlade and Idelba. The boys were even some kind of comfort, maybe, some kind of painful comfort. Something like that. Difficult for Vlade to know what Idelba was thinking; she was hard, and he was stunned just to see her again; he had no idea what he was feeling. It was like being slapped in the face. It was like that feeling of blasting out the Narrows into the Atlantic in a small boat, only bigger, stranger.