by Bob Morris
“I do, too,” she says. “I believe everything is made good by its association with you.”
“I believe maybe you’re getting a little carried away there,” I say. “Plus, we’re both more than a little drunk.”
The band starts playing “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?” The blond woman is no Van Morrison, or Rod Stewart, but she isn’t that bad.
“Let’s dance,” Barbara says.
We’re the only ones on the floor, but even when it’s crowded that’s the way it always feels with Barbara. She rests her chin on my shoulder. We move without even thinking. It feels right.
Barbara says, “Whisper sweet nothings in my ear.”
I nuzzle her hair, pull her even closer.
“Think Aunt Trula can recommend a good attorney?”
Barbara stops dancing. She looks up at me.
“You call that a sweet nothing?”
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m preoccupied.”
She puts her head back on my shoulder. We sway with the music.
“I’m sure Aunt Trula can recommend an attorney, Zack. But why? You aren’t in some kind of trouble, are you?”
“No, not yet,” I say. “But I’m getting ready to stir the pot.”
18
I don’t sleep worth a damn. Too much to drink, too much on my mind. It’s still dark when I slip out of the bed in Barbara’s room—to hell with Aunt Trula and her bunking arrangements—throw on clothes, and tiptoe down the hall toward the kitchen.
I’m just passing Aunt Trula’s bedroom when I hear her door creak open behind me. Aw, hell. Having a hangover is punishment enough. I don’t need Aunt Trula on my case.
When I turn around, it’s not Aunt Trula who is stepping into the hall. It’s Teddy Schwartz. Well, well, well …
Teddy flashes a conspiratorial grin.
“Appears I’ve been caught,” he says.
“Appears we both have.”
He gives me the once-over. If the outside of me looks half as bad as the inside feels, I’m a horrifying sight.
“I know where they keep the coffee,” he says.
“You’re a righteous man,” I say.
“And the aspirin.”
“A living saint.”
“I’ve found that some cheese toast also helps.”
“If there’s none of that,” I say, “I’ll settle for a morphine drip.”
Teddy leads the way. He’s a spry old guy, certainly spryer than me at this particular moment. I resolve to limit all further inquiries into the nature of Gosling’s to three drinks or less. Surely no more than four.
A peculiar odor—imagine sweat socks boiling in turpentine—assaults us as we make our way downstairs. My stomach does a somersault. Followed by a triple axel.
“Boggy’sup.”
“How can you tell?” asks Teddy.
“By the smell.”
We arrive in the kitchen to find Boggy sitting at the table, huddled over a mug of something hot and steamy. He nods at the stove where the pot responsible for the vile aroma sits bubbling on a burner.
“Please, drink,” he says. “I made enough for all of us.”
“How very thoughtful,” I say.
Teddy, his curiosity mixed with revulsion, lifts the lid on the pot, unleashing a fresh wave of noxiousness. He quickly puts the lid back on.
“Exactly what kind of wretched concoction is that?” he asks.
“Just some tea,” says Boggy.
“Don’t believe him. Whatever he’s got cooking in there it’s not just some tea,” I say. “Where’s the coffee?”
Teddy points to a cabinet. I find a canister of ground beans and a French press. I get water going in a kettle on the stove.
I find the aspirin, too. The dosage is two. I need three. I take four.
Teddy lifts the lid on the pot and takes another cautious whiff.
“Do I detect ginger?” he says.
Boggy nods.
“Also, bark of cedar, pulverized husk of mango seed, and …” A leather pouch sits on the table. Boggy reaches into it and pulls out a small bottle of black liquid. “Elixir of pig’s bile.”
“Kindly shut the hell up,” I say. “Unless you want to experience projectile vomiting on a personal level.”
Still, the so-called tea piques Teddy’s interest.
“This some sort of secret recipe?” he asks Boggy.
“Not secret,” says Boggy. “I just told you. Bark of cedar, pulverized husk of …”
“Em warning you,” I say. “When I hurl, Em hurling your way.”
“If you like, Zachary, I can also make a tea for rum poisoning.”
I ignore him. I drink a glass of water. Then another. The pipes are really burning this morning.
“This tea, it is an old recipe,” Boggy tells Teddy. “Handed down through the ages.”
“What’s it do?”
“All those things, they are natural antihistamines,” says Boggy. “They reduce the amount of fluid in the ears. This tea, it is good to drink before one goes out on the water. Or under it.”
“You have plans for today that I don’t know about?” I ask him.
Boggy looks at Teddy.
Teddy says, “Well actually, Zack, I did mention something to Boggy last night about the three of us heading out on my boat this morning.”
“Sorry, I’ve got some business matters I need to take care of.”
“Ah, come on. I’ll have you back long before noon. A good dive will cure all your ills,” Teddy says. “Plus, I thought you might be ready for a bit of diversion from Trula.”
I start to say something, then stop myself. Teddy laughs.
“I know, I know,” he says. “She can be a handful. But we’ve become quite fond of each other in recent months. She’s been trying to figure out a way to tell Barbara about us, but I guess my lurking about at five A.M. has taken care of that, eh? I suppose both Trula and I were feeling a bit randy last night.”
Entirely too much information.
The kettle whistles. I pour water into the French press and stir the grounds.
I find mugs in a cabinet. I hand one to Teddy.
“I think I might sample that tea first,” he says.
Boggy gets up, pulls a strainer from the sink, pours the tea through it, and hands the mug to Teddy. He blows on it, takes a sip.
“Tastes better than it smells,” he says.
“To damn by faint praise,” I say.
I plunge the press and pour a cup of coffee. It’s way too hot to drink and I’m impatient.
I go to the refrigerator and pull two cubes of ice from the freezer. I plop them in the mug and as soon as they have melted I take a long pull of coffee. The world remains grim but hope is ascendant.
Teddy drains his tea and smacks his lips.
“So,” he says. “Who’s ready to go diving?”
19
We arrive at Teddy Schwartz’s house in Somerset, near Bermuda’s westernmost tip, just as first light dapples the water of Mangrove Bay.
Given the opulence of Cutfoot Estate, I’m expecting something equally grand, especially for a Knight Commander of the British Empire. But Teddy’s house is modest by any comparison—one-story, solid in the way of most Bermudian dwellings, embraced by a wild tangle of bougainvillea and ligustrum.
Teddy nods us to the dock. I can just barely make out the profile of a boat, a pretty good size one.
“Just give me a minute to change clothes,” he says. “I’ll meet you down there.”
As Boggy and I reach the dock, the morning’s coffee and the previous night’s overindulgence collide to create the perfect storm in my stomach. I need to do some serious purging before we venture out on the water.
A long, low concrete-block building—the boathouse, I presume—sits nearby. I try the door. It opens. I reach for a light switch, find a rack of key chains instead, manage to knock some of them on the floor, onto a pile of dirty towels and boat rags. I fumble around some more,
find a switch, and flip on a light.
The room is giant, the size of a four-car garage, and it’s a study in clutter. There’s stuff piled everywhere. I spot the bathroom on the far side, hurry to it, and do my business.
When I come out, Boggy is nosing around the room. I nose around, too. There’s a lot to take in.
One corner is a repository of underwater equipment. It’s like a tactile timeline of diving, everything from old brass hard hats that predate the Aqua-Lung to antiquated regulators and an assortment of masks and fins. Elsewhere there are old tools and the relics of a lifetime spent in and on the water—anchors and chains, deck cleats and oars.
Stacks of lumber consume one entire wall, everything from teak and mahogany to more exotic woods that I can’t identify. There’s a table saw and a lathe and various woodworking tools.
I join Boggy beside a massive workbench that occupies the middle of the room. A blue tarpaulin covers most of it. A carpenter’s box holds a variety of small tools—pliers, tweezers, screwdrivers—made for precision work. They are arranged neatly alongside glass jars filled with gold and silver bric-a-brac, bits of wire, shiny odds and ends.
Stacked at one end of the workbench are several glossy, coffee tabletype books along with some that would fall into the reference category. I notice a couple of titles: Ornamentation in the Elizabethan Era and Fundamentals of Metalsmithing. There’s also what appears to be an assortment of catalogs from museums and auction houses all over the world.
I’m trying to figure out what it might mean when Teddy steps inside the boathouse. He does not look pleased.
“How did you get in here?”
“The door was open,” I say.
Teddy examines the doorknob, turning it back and forth. He casts a worried look around the room.
“Is something wrong?” I ask.
He ignores me. He steps across the room to the other side of the workbench. He lifts the tarp, looks under it. Then he looks at Boggy and me.
“If you don’t mind …”
He gestures us to step outside.
Heading for the door, I stoop to pick up the key chains that I knocked off the rack.
“Never mind about those!” Teddy barks. “I’ll get them.”
Jeez, what a bear. Maybe Boggy’s tea did a number on him or something. We wait for him on the dock.
When Teddy finally emerges from the boathouse he carries a big, black neoprene dive bag over one shoulder. It has something inside, something fairly bulky.
“Look,” I say. “I’m sorry if you didn’t want us going in there. But nature called.”
Teddy shrugs it off, smiles. He slaps my back.
“Forget it,” he says. “Old men living alone tend to get a little too set in their ways. Let something upset the normal course of things and we react like fussy hens.”
We board Teddy’s boat. It’s an old Rehmbauer 32 with twin diesels, worn by the years but well maintained, a sturdy rig that could easily accommodate a dozen divers and all their gear. Miss Peg, it’s called.
Teddy carefully stashes his dive bag, then steps to the wheel, opens a compartment in the console. He pulls out a worn and weathered logbook that contains page after page of coordinates for various dive sites. He finds the one he’s looking for, punches its numbers into a GPS mounted on the console.
He cranks the engines, let’s them run a couple minutes while he tends to matters that always need doing on a boat: spraying WD-40 on the corroded pedestal of the captain’s chair, wiping mildew off a seat cushion, stowing gear that has mysteriously escaped its lodging.
“You boys grab the lines,” he says.
We make free from the dock. And we’re off.
20
Forty-five minutes later and about eight miles offshore, Teddy backs off the engines. He consults the GPS, makes a couple of adjustments in course, slows down to idle speed.
There’s nothing to distinguish our position from the miles and miles of open water that surround us, except for a slight darkening of the water about fifty yards off our bow and the occasional whitecap that crests over it. Teddy keeps an eye on the spot as he maneuvers the boat.
Boggy is already at the bow, ready to drop anchor. Another glance at the GPS and Teddy gives him the signal. The line feeds out, the anchor hits bottom. Teddy pops it into reverse, the anchor holds. He shuts off the engines.
As Teddy busies himself around the boat, I ask him how Miss Peg got her name.
“After my late wife, bless her. Died long before her time,” Teddy says. “It’s more boat than I need these days, but I can’t bring myself to part with her. We’ve been through it, the two of us. It was on Miss Peg that I found the San Miguel de Verona and, just a few months later, the Beatrice”
“Beatrice … that’s the wreck the scepter came from, right? Schwartz’s Scepter.”
Teddy nods.
“And after that, Miss Peg was so well known that every time I went out on her to look for something new, there would be boats following us, hoping to pick up the scraps. Got so bad I had to buy another boat and send Peg out in one direction as a decoy while I went in the other,” says Teddy. “Rough and wooly days, I’m telling you. Used to be you could come upon a boat out here and risk getting yourself shot at.”
He lifts a hatch seat and in the compartment below I see a leather rifle case, a box of ammunition.
“Old habit to keep it aboard,” Teddy says. “I fire off a few rounds every now and then, just to make sure it still works. You can never tell.”
Teddy opens a locker, pulls out a wet suit, and starts putting it on. I stand around, waiting for instructions. It’s Teddy’s boat and I don’t want to start yanking gear out of lockers until he gives me the go-ahead. Particularly after his little scene back at the boathouse.
He hasn’t laid out our dive plan yet. Trips like this, though, you go to all the trouble of packing up and heading out, they’re usually two-tank dives. Depending on how deep you go, the first dive might last forty-five minutes or so, followed by a surface interval to get rid of the nitrogen that builds up in the blood when you’re breathing compressed air at depth. The second dive is typically a bit shallower.
Boggy doesn’t do scuba. He’s strictly a free diver. So we’ve already decided that he’ll keep an eye on things topside while Teddy and I blow bubbles down below.
While Teddy suits up, Boggy sits atop the boat’s transom in full lotus position, eyes closed. He inhales deeply, exhales slowly.
After a couple of minutes of this foolishness, he stands and says: “I go now, take a look below.”
“You’ve got about a hundred feet of water down there, right off the boat,” says Teddy.
“Good,” says Boggy.
And then he springs overboard, hardly making a splash as he slices into the water.
I’m antsy, ready to get into the water myself. But Teddy still hasn’t pointed me to my gear.
“So what’s this site called?” I ask him.
“Sock ’Em Dog,” he says. “There’s a seamount juts up about fifty yards astern, looks like the head of a Labrador, at least in the eyes of some. It’s poked holes in many a boat, the most famous being the Victory, a stern-wheeler used by the South as a blockade runner during your Civil War. When she broke up, part of her went down one side, part of her the other. There’s not all that much left to look at, but I like to come out here because the commercial dive boats seldom venture this far and I can have it all to myself.”
Teddy stands up and adjusts his wet suit. He attaches his buoyancy compensator vest to one of the dozen or so steel tanks lined up in their slots behind a bench that runs along one side of the deck. He grabs a regulator, hooks it up to the tank and vest, then checks the gauges.
He looks overboard, to where Boggy entered the water.
“It’s been a couple of minutes,” he says. “Is he all right?”
“He’s fine. Just showing off.”
Teddy sifts through a plastic crate, pulls out a weig
ht belt, checks the lead on it, then fastens it around his waist. He slips on a mask and lets it dangle under his chin.
He looks overboard again, this time with real concern.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “He’s good for at least six or seven minutes.”
“You’re joking.”
“Afraid not. I’ve timed him.”
“Has it got something to do with that tea he made?”
“It might, along with that breathing thing he was doing. He calls it ‘putting on his fish brain.’ Boggy, he sets his mind on doing something, and then he does it.”
“Quite a remarkable fellow.”
“He has his moments,” I say.
The ice chest sits under one of the benches. Teddy opens it. Inside, there’s a block of ice and some jugs of water.
Teddy pulls an ice pick from a drawer by the console and chops off two chunks of ice.
“A little trick of my own,” he says, taking a chunk of ice in each hand. He wedges them behind his ears and presses them against his skull. “Causes the inner ear to contract, makes it a little easier going down.”
He keeps up the ice treatment for another minute or so, until the chunks have melted away. He reaches into the drawer again. This time he pulls out a Ping-Pong paddle. He holds it in one hand, the ice pick in the other.
“A treasure hunter’s two best friends,” he says.
“A Ping-Pong paddle?”
Teddy nods.
“Nothing works better for fanning away sand and silt. And an ice pick is still the tool of choice when it comes to prying something loose without totally destroying it.”
“We looking for something down there?”
“Not really. Believe me, if anything’s down there, then I’ve already found it,” he says. “But it never hurts to be prepared.”
His bulky dive bag hangs from the console. He zips it open, puts paddle and pick inside, along with whatever else he’s got in there. He hooks the dive bag onto his BCV. He sits down on the bench, slips his arms through the BCV, and cinches it around his waist and chest. He grabs a pair of fins from below the bench and puts them on.
I’m beginning to wonder if I’ll be joining Teddy on this dive. He’s ready to go, and I’m still just standing around.