Nightmare Country

by Marlys Millhiser

  Bo lifted a corner of foil and made a face. “Potato salad? In the Caribbean?”

  One cooler harvested bottles of beer before the boat got to the reef. Thad thought of all the warnings he’d heard about drinking and diving being more dangerous than drinking and driving. But he’d rarely come across a harder-drinking group than American sport divers on vacation. Maybe Dixie had reason to worry.

  The only cigarettes aboard were lit by Martha and the two Pazes.

  Aulalio Paz stood at the rear of the boat, his feet to either side of the rudder, a four-foot horizontal pipe about two inches off the floor. His eyes searched out coral landmarks and passages in the shallow lagoon. His brother, Eliseo, worked the engines up front. Barrel-chested men with short legs and protruding, sagging stomachs. The only sign of Stefano in them was their perfect teeth.

  Aulalio swayed back and forth as he guided the boat between his ankles. Behind him Mayan Cay looked like a jeweled paradise by Walt Disney. Thad wondered how it looked in a hurricane. Martha Durwent shivered as if she’d heard his thought. She turned toward the surf breaking on the reef ahead of them. Foam fingers crawling into the lagoon were all that was left of the broken sea.

  The dive boat shuddered as it entered a narrow channel, rose to crest the first roller in the real ocean, and swooped down to spill spray across the divers before rising for the next swell.

  Martha closed a wet notebook. “I knew I shouldn’t have come. But they”—her gesture included all the occupants of the boat—“made it into some kind of challenge between the sexes.”

  Thad was tired of having to feel sorry for every third woman he met. “What is it you write in there?” He tapped the notebook.

  “I’m taking notes for a novel.” Her sunglasses tilted as if she expected him to laugh.

  “Hey, Doc?” Bo Smith and three beers wove between a watermelon and a pile of diving gear. There was always one in a crowd who took pity on outsiders. Bo handed them each a bottle. “Dixie told us about your daddy? Hope you find him one way or the other. Hell not knowing.” He drew on his beer and then held it away to look at it. “Can’t get nothin’ cold down here. Sorry about the uh … the other, too.”

  “The other” meaning Ricky. Funny how people could discuss anything but that.

  “Now, Martha, honey, don’t look so glum. We’ll bring you up a body for your book.”

  She was trying to hold the notebook out of the spray and keep the beer from sloshing out of the bottle as the boat dipped and rolled. The others were taking bets on how long the watermelons could tumble from stern to bow before breaking up, lifting their feet off the deck, moving coolers, laughing, shouting.

  “These boys do have fun, don’t they? You two are going to have fun too, just wait. No fair kicking it there, Abrams. Damn cheat!”

  The Pazes just grinned. They’d have some great tales to tell at Roudan’s tonight. Mayan Cay was out of sight. The little boat was alone on a bright sun-washed sea. But there were clouds on the horizon.

  “Dixie tells me that the Metnál is supposed to be Mayan for ‘graveyard.’” Bo nodded solemnly. “Bound to be some bodies for Martha’s book.”

  9

  Sun streaks pierced water to illuminate one end of a metal pontoon tube and a giant anchor leaning upright against it, the anchor crusted onto the pontoon by coral growth.

  Sounds. The gurgled exhalation of air bubbles from Thad’s regulator. The high-pitched but subtle ringing in his ears as the ocean enclosed him with the sounds in his head. A distant roar that could be sea or the air trapped in his ears. Despite the combination of these minor sounds, it seemed a silent, eerie world underwater.

  The skin on the inside of his thighs felt the chill change to cold as he and his diving partner, Harry, who owned a “slew” of bakeries, descended toward the wreck on the bottom, the pitch of the sound of their bubbles rising as they sank. Harry was fast on his way to becoming bald, and he kept the few remaining hairs long. They waved in the water like fan coral.

  This area of the Metnál had odd-shaped coral heads that soared in mountain cliffs from the ocean floor and broad valleys of sea grass interspersed with barren patches of sand or what resembled piles of volcanic rock, but were instead coral clumps. The Metnál was known for the wrecked ships that littered its coral canyons. Ships of almost every age in history. No one had found the Spanish galleons filled with golden plunder known to be in these waters, but Thad had read recently of salvage crews bringing up pieces of what authorities thought to be a Mayan galley or coastal trader blown off course and out to sea.

  What was left of the giant pontoon boat lay in a meadow of sea grass, one end in sun and one in the shadow of a coral cliff.

  A blue parrot fish grazed on coral at the edge of a gaping hole in the pontoon. It twined away into the blackness of the hole as they drew closer. Light streaks highlighted waving chartreuse plant blades around the craft, tiny fish darting among them.

  Another diver floated down a light streak, and Thad thought of a peculiarly dressed angel descending a shimmery ladder from the skies. And that, for some reason, made him think of the Ambergris. Wouldn’t it be strange if he came across a sunken yacht by that name somewhere in the Metnál? The skeletal Kellers sitting around the breakfast table?

  Wrecked and tangled girders, twisted metal ladders, and coral were about all that connected the two pontoons now. All but an overturned farm tractor, which Thad guessed to be of World War II vintage, had been salvaged. Two of the boys from L.A. were trying to turn a tractor wheel, but it was stuck fast.

  Had Edward P. Alexander III been here? The name Metnál alone would lure an adventurer like Edward P.

  Maybe it was blood, heredity. Maybe that was what raised the gooseflesh on Edward P. Alexander III’s son as he followed his diving buddy along the sunken hulk, feeling the cold draft in the water over the hole in the pontoon, seeing shadow fish flit about in its dark interior. They came to the entrance in the coral canyon at the rear of the wreck, entered it. Thad wondered what it would feel like to die of suffocation. How hard would he struggle? Would he pray?

  Fish. Different colors and shapes for different strata. The bottom of this canyon was too deep for the eyes and light to fathom, but Thad had the impression of marine creatures he could not imagine rising to marvel at him, as a strange creature above. At the upper levels he saw the fish he’d seen within the reef. The bright yellow fish with black fins and black puckered “kissing” lips. The fish with markings resembling eyes near their tails that made them appear to swim backward.

  An instant of cold as a shadow passed over them, and they looked up to see a huge eagle ray “fly” sinuously overhead with a graceful rippling.

  The canyon became increasingly populated, but Harry turned, pointed to his dive watch, and gave a thumbs-up sign. Thad followed him back the way they’d come. They’d almost reached the end of the canyon when the current—which was ever trying to drive him against coral walls—lifted him suddenly over Harry, out into the open sea valley, and into a group of barracudas. They seemed as startled as he by the odd slamming noise and the new violence of the current—thrown against him one moment, swimming into him the next. Their slender bodies felt cool and dry against his bare legs, while the jacket of his father’s wet suit felt clammy.

  Harry-the-baker shot from the canyon as some of the barracudas appeared to be sucked into it lower down. Bizarre. As if there were two currents, one on top of the other and going in opposite directions, the one beneath a powerful undertow that Thad and the fish struggled to keep away from. Coral heads tumbled from canyon rims, expelling debris that looked like dust but was really tiny marine life and trapped air bubbles, much like skyscrapers might crumble in a disaster film. A vibration and a pressure in the water.

  Harry’s face mask began to fill with blood.

  Thad looked around for help but saw only rubber fins and air bubbles heading for the surface. Harry pulled off his mask to let the blood escape. Despite their fearsome reputation
s, the barracudas seemed not the least incited by the blood streaming from the diver’s nose. Thad pulled him to the surface slowly, allowing time for their bubbles to precede them and decompression to take place in their bodies.

  “Hell, we’d about decided to come back for you.” Hands pulled his buddy away, and others helped him remove his fins and ascend the ladder.

  “Harry, stop bleedin’, you’ll attract every shark in the Metnál.”

  “Somebody throw a towel around that turkey’s face.”

  They soon had Harry stretched out on the shelf seat, wet towels under the back of his neck and under his nose. Bo and Aulalio Paz were counting heads. Greg Durwent sat down by his wife this time.

  “What happened down there?” Martha looked from her husband to Thad. “It sounded like a muffled … I don’t know. Whump? And the boat shivered.”

  “Could it a been an underwater explosion of some kind, do you think?” Bo Smith flipped the top off a Styrofoam cooler and withdrew a chicken drumstick.

  “Earthquake, maybe?” Don Bodecker, the salesman and youngest of the boys from L.A., stacked used tanks in the container box with holes.

  A subdued group. Thoughtful. A few jokes, but more sideways glances to judge the reactions of others, gauge the seriousness of what had happened. Neither Paz had grinned since they’d climbed back into the boat. They glanced often out over the water, at the sky, at each other.

  “I never see nothing like that before, mon.” Eliseo reached for his pack of cigarettes and then seemed to notice he already had one lit. “You want to go back now?”

  “Let us eat and discuss this matter further.” Bo Smith heaved the busted watermelons overboard. “We came a long way to dive the Metnál. Let us not be too hasty in leaving these here waters.”

  Chicken, fresh pineapple, chewy conch salad, some of the awful island bread and more beer. The talk grew jovial. Harry’s nose had dried up. Someone threw the crock of potato salad overboard to join the melons. “Goin’ to give those fucking fishes the sammynella ole Dixie had planned for us.”

  “Never did see so many bacca-ruda in one place before, did you?”

  Thad stretched out to let the sun soak away the chill of the deep in his bones. The clouds that had been far out on the horizon before their dive had moved in a third of the way across the sky now.

  A vote was taken, and only Martha Durwent and the Pazes wanted to go back to Mayan Cay. They didn’t count. The sea had gone smooth. Divers draped themselves around the boat to sunbathe and rest while Aulalio guided them to a new spot far from the dangers of the first for an afternoon dive. There was still a wait before they should go down again, and the inevitable pack of cards surfaced.

  “Is this still the Metnál?” Martha asked Eliseo.

  “Oh, yes, big place, Metnál. All over here.”

  “What’s down there to look at this afternoon?”

  “German submarine. Not deep.”

  “Hey, no shit?”

  “All right!”

  “You pullin’ our legs, boy? What’d a U-boat be doing here? War didn’t get down here.”

  “These were British waters,” Thad offered. “And useful for interfering with coastal shipping and trade with the U.S.”

  “Martha, honey, we are goin’ to bring you up a body yet. What’d I tell ya?”

  “Just make sure it isn’t Greg’s.” She’d been tight-lipped since she’d lost the vote.

  “That am one nervous woman.” Bo drew a duffel bag up to Thad’s lounging area and sat on it. “Least she gets out here. My wife won’t even leave the country. Just stays in her house, raisin’ kids and reading her Jesus books all day. And all night.”

  “Why are women so attracted to religion?” Thad said before he realized he was giving something.

  Too late to take it back. Bo picked up on it immediately. “So there’s a person inside that walkin’ iceberg after all. You got one of ’em too, huh?”

  “Had.”

  “Oh. Well, I think women think they’re more helpless than they really are, and they’re smart enough to know men aren’t very strong, and they figure the Lord’ll fill the gap. Don’t make me no never-mind. Excepting that over the years a woman’ll begin to save all her fire for the Lord. Makes for cold nights.”

  Bo Smith opened another beer, took a long drag, then lay back to watch the sky. “But hell, I can’t complain. Sue Ellen’s given me five beautiful children. I just love kids? Wish mine would stay that way. Most of ’em are almost grown and being asses, but then, I got to remember they’ll have kids, which means I get grandkids, and like I said, I just love … Oh, Jesus, I did it again.”

  “What?”

  “Forgot your problem. Had to go talking kids.”

  “That’s okay, I forgot too.” Thad, lying on the shelf seat, looked down into the eyes of the man on the deck below him, and for an instant there was contact. Thad looked away.

  “You’re gonna be all right, Doc. Time’s almost up. One of these days you’re gonna start over. I wouldn’t want me and mine to go through what you and yours have. But not everybody gets another chance.”

  Thad felt oddly close to this man, who in many ways represented the macho bigot he despised.

  “Your daddy, now—now that we have broached difficult subjects—he would have been interested in what happened to us this morning.”

  Thad laughed, and every head in the boat turned toward him. “He would have told you that the currents and explosion or whatever we felt was caused by a flying saucer either leaving or entering an underwater space hangar, or that Atlantis is about to rise from beneath the sea. I take it you’ve read him.”

  “Couple of his books is all. How do you know it wasn’t a flying saucer landing or taking off? If Sue Ellen can believe in what she does on faith ’cause she doesn’t have much in the way of facts, why can’t your daddy believe in what he does? Probably got more facts than Sue Ellen does. What do you think it was?”

  “Earth tremor of some kind.”

  “Tremors usually mean a quake is coming, don’t they?”

  “Not always. Odds are we won’t have any problems this afternoon.”

  “Yeah. Probably never know what it was. Things like that irk the hell out of me.”

  “Make good material for my father’s books, though.”

  “Dopes like me buy ’em to get explanations of the niggling little unexplainables so they’ll stop niggling.”

  Thad wanted to tell Bo Smith about the Ambergris. But he didn’t.

  It was decided that Harry Rothnel, the baker, should not dive that afternoon and risk another nosebleed, and that Aulalio would stay topside with him and Martha. Thad drew Eliseo Paz as his new dive partner.

  The divers didn’t trade so many jokes this afternoon as they perched on the edge of the boat, their feet in rubber fins on the shelf seat, and one by one threw themselves backward into the sea. The only quip was from Bo, when half the group was in the water. “Keep a sharp eye out for submerged space hangars and flying saucers, you turkeys. And don’t forget Martha’s body.”

  “Now, who could forget Martha’s body? Bo, you …”

  Thad hit the water, tank first, and didn’t hear the rest. The usual idiosyncrasies at the beginning of a dive—the little shock on impact with the alien medium, the slight hesitation as he was immersed that had no time to assert itself, the temptation to hold his breath instead of sucking in on the regulator. They’d agreed to stay close this time. Follow their one guide, Eliseo.

  Thad was surprised at how close he was to the bottom, a barren area compared to that of the morning. The divers were grouping below, waiting for the rest to arrive. It must have been no more than thirty or forty feet. What would a sub be doing in so shallow a place?

  The others were turning around in circles, nudging each other, shrugging in question-mark pantomime. Perhaps because there were no fish, nothing crawling along the bottom. As the last divers arrived, the sunlight departed. Even at that depth and in tropical w
aters, the chill was instant, clear water took on shadows, became murky.

  Eliseo did the turning bit now, as if to get his bearings, and then rose above them to do it again. Thad sensed a question in Eliseo’s posture too. But Stefano Paz’s son finally straightened, regardless of the fact he was six feet from earth, and arched an arm with the exaggerated slowness of most rapid movements against water. He’d found a submarine. How do you kill a submarine at thirty feet?

  It lay intact, instead of in pieces. Eliseo had to scrape sand from a patch of it to prove the giant wiener shape on the sea floor was made of metal. Others scraped. One pounded. The sound, even underwater, came back hollow. Divers rose away from it, looking down, then at the man on either side, then down again. Beneath the layer of sand the sub was surprisingly free of coral encrustation.

  Eliseo rose to pivot, search the murky water with his eyes. Landmarks of some sort may have been destroyed in the turbulence of the morning. The phenomenon might have extended this far. Thad wished he had an intercom with his diving buddy.

  The sub lay on its side, the bare outline of a conning tower shaped like a giant cigarette lighter under the sand. The ship seemed too small to hold the lives of men and their equipment within it. Were they still inside?

  Thad recognized the ghoul in himself and turned back to Eliseo. The guide had gone off alone—exactly what he’d warned everyone else not to do. He motioned now for the others, and Thad was the first to reach him. Eliseo swam on, and then stopped, pointing down. Thad could see nothing but sand, no rocks, no debris, not even a dead fish. As if the area had been cleaned up for a beach. Eliseo spread his arms out and then down, shook his head, pointed down once more.

  Some of the others wandered away from the sub and angled toward them.

  The sea floor was slightly mounded, the sub lying far off to the side. Grains of sand trickled down the surface of the mound. Thad had seen this before, when crabs burrowed to escape detection, but he had never seen it occur in so many places at once.