The Shell Collector

by Hugh Howey

  “I guess. Yeah.” What I really meant was: If you’re trying to murder me, it’s smart not to have witnesses, and I’m on to you, buddy.

  “If it makes you feel better, I have Monique packing us a picnic lunch. And Vincent, who takes care of my cars, is going to get the boat ready for us. I don’t do everything around here.”

  “Monique?” I ask.

  “My housekeeper. You’ve got your valve on? Air flowing?”

  I press the button on my regulator, and there’s a loud blast of air. Ness lifts the BC—which is like an uninflated vest that the tank straps to—and helps me get my arms through. There’s a hose that runs from the top of the tank to the vest. Ness shows me what to press to inflate the vest and how to let the air out. With this and the right amount of weight around my waist, he says I can stay level at any depth. And if I need to get to the surface, I can just inflate the vest and enjoy the ride. “Just breathe out the entire time,” he reminds me.

  I wonder if I should tell him that when I panic, I tend to either not breathe or hyperventilate. Instead, I tell myself, over and over, to always breathe. To exhale. And to stay fucking calm, Maya, you’re not going to die.

  “It’s not deep at the bottom of the ramp, so remember that you can always stand up if you’re uncomfortable for any reason. And I’ll be right there beside you.”

  “Okay,” I mumble around my mouthpiece. I get my mask situated. Ness has me leave my fins off for now. Walking carefully—all that weight on my back threatening to topple me over—I follow Ness down the ramp. I don’t understand how people enjoy a sport that involves so much heavy and bulky gear. I feel exhausted already, and I haven’t even started doing the actual diving.

  I’m so nervous shuffling down the ramp—the water creeping up my ankles and then my knees—that I don’t notice Ness is holding my hand or that I’m holding his. Or that he’s steadying me, another hand on my shoulder. All I feel is the coolness of the morning sea rising up, the initial shock before my wetsuit fills with water. It takes a moment until the water is trapped and warmed by my body, and then it’s no longer so bracingly cold. I also notice how the weight of all the gear disappears now that I’m in the water. It’s only awkward on dry land, like a fish staggering along on its poor fins.

  “When you’re ready, just lower your head beneath the surface and take easy breaths,” Ness says. “It’s just like snorkeling.”

  This is not like snorkeling, I want to say. But I can’t scream over my pounding pulse, can’t talk with the regulator in my mouth. Snorkeling is breathing through a plastic tube sticking up in the air. No physics involved. No warnings needed. A child can sort out how that works. This is me strapped to a contraption, a deflated vest on, tubes hanging everywhere, a bulky watch on my wrist blinking with all kinds of numbers. This is not snorkeling.

  I descend until my feet leave the ramp and find the sand. The water is up to my chest. Ness is watching me. My visor has already fogged from the nervous heat of my cheeks. I take the mask off, dunk it into the water, consider spitting inside it to keep it from fogging, would normally do this, but not in front of Ness. I put the mask back on. It’s now or never.

  “I’m right here,” Ness says softly. “You’ll be fine.”

  I nod, gather my courage, and remind myself that people do this all the time. I’m already breathing through the contraption, aren’t I? I realize that I’m breathing a lot. Huffing and puffing. I hear the hiss of my exhalations. I remember what Ness said about being calm, about breathing easy, and I try. I really try.

  “Here goes,” I mumble incomprehensibly.

  I bend my knees, lower my body, and the water comes up to my neck, and then my chin, and then over my mouth, up my visor, the weights around my waist helping me sink under, until I’m seeing the sand and the rocks and the ramp through my mask. A silver fish flits past, chasing after some unseen breakfast. And I hear a hiss as I breathe in, see bubbles as I exhale, and I’m doing it. I’m breathing underwater. Tears blur my vision. I blink them away. There are clams or some kind of bivalve growing over the rocks that make up the breakwater. Small fish peck at the algae along the rocks, signs of life clinging where it can. An entire world of feeble life surviving here.

  And I’m among them. Floating. Face-down. Under the water. Ness’s hands are on my stomach and on my shoulder, steadying me, and I’m breathing. I scoop the water ahead of me, swim forward, allowing myself to drift a little deeper, and even though I’m slowly sinking, it feels like I’m flying.

  19

  It takes me half an hour to get comfortable removing my mask underwater, putting it back on, and then “clearing it.” This last part requires breathing out through my nose while I pin the top of my mask to my forehead with both hands. The water around my eyes is gradually replaced with exhaled air from the tank. Opening my eyes without being able to reach inside my mask to wipe them feels strange and burns a little, but I survive the ordeal. Ness makes me do it two more times.

  He also teaches me how to put the regulator back in my mouth underwater, press the purge button, and start breathing air instead of the Atlantic. It feels weird, the forced blast of air filling my mouth and puffing my cheeks, but I decide I can survive this as well. I feel like an astronaut undergoing emergency NASA training. I’m no longer terrified to get to the beach and do some diving. I’m almost excited. Ness helps me out of the water and up the ramp, when I hear him mention something about getting the boat ready.

  “Where are we diving, exactly?” I ask. “Just off the beach, right?”

  “No, we’re going a little ways offshore. There’s a great wreck I want you to see and some good shelling spots. Don’t worry, it’s not deep.”

  “Sixty feet ten minutes,” I say, partly to myself. I gather my soaked hair into a bun and squeeze the water out. Ness is laughing at my worried mumbling, but he seems tickled by it rather than mocking.

  “There’s Vincent,” he says.

  I turn and see a man in tan coveralls standing in front of the boathouse. Olive skin, thick mustache, dark hair. He has a real cigarette between his lips, not one of those vapes. He rubs his hands with a white rag. The pointy white bow of a center console is visible inside the open doors of the boathouse, which Vincent must’ve been working on while I was learning how to not drown.

  “Boat’s ready, boss,” he calls out, seeing us looking his way.

  The entire spectacle of Vincent—with the cigarette and mustache and coveralls—is just too cliché. As is this calling Ness “boss.” The most annoying part of my job as a journalist is when I have to leave out details to make a story more believable. Life has a way of being both more surreal and more predictable than readers can tolerate.

  Ness, of course, is oblivious to this. He just waves his thanks.

  Beyond the boathouse, a slender woman in a white mid-thigh dress descends the steps from the boardwalk. She has a basket in one hand, a small cooler in the other. “Vincent will get that,” Ness tells me, as I bend to collect our dive gear. “I want you to meet Monique.”

  We walk to the boathouse in our dripping wetsuits. I suddenly feel aware of the tight-fitting neoprene. It’s the two people who aren’t wearing dive suits who make me self-conscious. I shake Vincent’s hand as we meet on the boardwalk, and then he heads over to retrieve our duffel bags, tanks, BCs, and the rest of our gear.

  “Hey Monique, this is the reporter from the Times I told you about.”

  I shake Monique’s hand, noting that Ness has mentioned me before and that I’m “the reporter.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” she says. A hint of a French accent. Another detail I would choose to leave out, but I’ve already decided to edit Monique out of the story altogether. I tell myself it’s for the sake of believability.

  “Your favorite sandwiches,” she says to Ness. “Fruit. A salad. I put a selection of drinks in the cooler, wasn’t sure what your friend would want.” She smiles at me.

  I try to smile back. The annoyance I feel is ha
rd to place—might just be the infernal cattiness I sometimes sink into around women when we first meet, which usually dissipates once we get to know each other. I worry for a moment that my attempt at a smile looks more like a sneer. I’m trying, I swear.

  “Sounds delicious,” Ness says, studying the supplies. “You know how famished I get after a dive.”

  “Of course,” Monique says. And to me: “Nice to meet you. Good shelling.”

  I’d forgotten we were going after shells. The diving and the boat and the introductions have me scattered. I try to remember that this is going to be a perfect day. Not a day for dying. Or being murdered.

  Vincent arrives with the gear, and I jump in the boat to take the tanks from him. The smell of the gas engine, the vinyl seats, the rot on the low-tide pilings, the gurgle of the idling outboards, all remind me of days out on the water with my dad. He kept our boat on the grass beside the driveway, and the salt water from the bilge kept a patch of the yard brown and lifeless.

  Surprisingly, Ness’s boat isn’t much nicer than the one we grew up with. There’s a small cuddy cabin up front. A bait well in the floor. Dad kept our bait well full of closed cell foam for nestling the shells in. When the shelling was bad, we’d cast nets for bait and come home with fish instead. We weren’t allowed to come home empty-handed. It sometimes meant staying out after dark, which was when he taught me to recognize the lights of the boats on the water. Green over white for trawling. Red over white for fishing. All those twinkling, colorful constellations meant something to my father. The amount of time a buoy flashed—long, short, short—and he knew right where he was.

  I miss him powerfully in that moment, standing aboard Ness’s boat, packing away the gear, all these things I did when I was eight that I do now at thirty-two. So much like Dad’s boat that I almost expect to turn and see him there, standing behind the wheel, telling me to cast off the lines, but it’s Ness saying it. He’s as old as my father was when he used to take me out. So young in retrospect, but Dad seemed impossibly ancient to me at the time. I thought I’d never be as old as he was, and yet here I am. And here he isn’t.

  “You’re all clear,” I tell Ness, taking the last of the dock lines from Vincent. The mechanic pulls the dangling cigarette from his lips, smiles, and waves bon voyage. Pilings and the walls of the boathouse slide by, and then the low sun hits us again, and we are in the bay, pulling away. Monique and Vincent watch us with shielded eyes before they turn to tidy up.

  “Sunscreen,” Ness reminds me. He hands me a bottle, and I start applying it to my face and neck. The wind picks up, and I lean with Ness against the wide bench seat behind the console. I watch him navigate the breakers, and I enjoy the thrum of the deck and the rise and fall of the bow as the sea reaches around the rocks and we race out to meet her head-on.

  “That sandbar makes a nice break,” I say, raising my voice over the blat of the outboards and the hiss of the hull against the waves. I gesture toward the beach as we round the seawall; the backs of curling breakers can be seen as they topple and race toward the shore.

  “You surf?” he asks.

  I nod. “I took it up about ten years ago. It changed the way I shell.”

  “Totally,” Ness says. “I’ve always said surfers make the best shellers. No one watches the sea and gets to know her rhythms like surfers do. When you study the breaks, you get to know what the world is like beneath all that water—”

  “You can see where the pockets are,” I say, finishing his thought. “You can picture what the reef looks like. Where the crags are and how the shells tumble in and get caught up. If it were me, I’d snorkel right out behind that point—” I gesture toward the natural jetty to the south.

  “It’s a good spot,” Ness says. “If we weren’t skipping snorkeling, I would’ve taken you there.” He leans back, steering with just two fingers on the wheel, the lightest of touches. “This is the progression of my journey, really. As shells get harder and harder to find, we have to chase them back to the source. We can’t rely on them to wash up the beach. This is the path that led me to your shells—”

  “The murex?” I ask. “Is that where we’re going today?”

  “No,” Ness says. “Today is about showing you a phase of my journey. Trust me. You want to write your piece in installments, allow me to do the same.”

  I feel like he’s punishing me, drawing it out like this. Getting back at me for my series of planned articles about his family.

  “Diving is different than snorkeling, anyway. It’s too deep to read the swell. So we rely on instruments.” He indicates the depth meter and fish finder. The latter reveals the depths in a jagged line that must mean more to him than it does to me. “Knowing where to dive is the hard part,” he says. “In a lot of places, the sand moves under there. It’s different every day. And each year, we have to go deeper and deeper to get the good shells before someone else does. We have to fight over what few shells remain.”

  “Soon we’ll be finding the loves of our lives in grade school,” I say.

  Ness turns and studies me, his brow wrinkled in confusion, and I realize that I spoke out loud.

  “Do what?” he asks.

  “It’s … I have this thing about shelling and relationships,” I say. I imagine Michael up at the bow, looking back at me and rolling his eyes. But the analogy is too good to leave be. “What you just said, about getting to the shells early, it made me think of another way that shelling is like love. Shelling along the beach, grabbing the remnants, that’s like dating people our age, you know? People in their thirties and forties. They’re all roughed up. Late catches.”

  Ness laughs. Really laughs. He slaps the steering wheel. “So snorkeling would be like dating in college,” he says.

  “Or maybe at work,” I offer. “Diving would be like dating in college. If you don’t find someone early, all the good ones are gone. Just like with shells.”

  Ness nods. I make a mental note of this metaphor. Michael would absolutely loathe it. I’ll have to email it to him.

  “Shelling is like relationships,” Ness says. He turns away from me and scans the beach, makes an adjustment with the wheel. “I can see that.” He nods to himself. “Yeah, I can totally see that.”

  20

  I watch the shore recede until it becomes a thin, dark line. Only the lighthouse remains distinct, a finger of black jutting up from an outcrop not far from Ness’s estate. There is a gentle undulation to the sea, a rhythmic swell. The outboards roar. We pass patches of drifting seagrass. In the distance, a handful of birds trace lazy circles against the sky, signs of sporadic life in this watery wilderness.

  Finally, Ness throttles back and the bow dips. The boat slows. We are in a patch of sea that looks like any other on the surface, but I see Ness studying the GPS, which shows our boat as a small triangle on top of a classic symbol for a shipwreck: a curved hull with what might be a sail-less mast but looks more like a cemetery cross.

  “I thought you said it was just offshore,” I say. Ness reverses the throttle briefly to kill our speed, then looks back toward land.

  “Seven miles,” he says. “Practically on the beach.”

  He goes forward to toss out the anchor. I slide over into his spot and study the GPS. The large screen shows the depth of the water in feet. Right by our position, the numbers range from 70 to 120. There’s a steep ridge here. The water is much deeper toward land before rising back up again. If all the oceans were stripped away, these would be rolling hills overlooking a majestic valley. Instead, it’s a world invisible, the contours seen only in a scattering of numbers and covered over by fathoms of blue dirt.

  “You said earlier that I shouldn’t dive deeper than sixty feet,” I point out. Maybe it’s the shipwreck symbol or my bout of paranoia earlier, but I have a bad feeling about this plot of sea. Like something awful will happen here.

  Ness throws out the anchor and watches as coil after coil of rope zips over the rail. When the line begins to slide away laz
ily, he cinches it off on a cleat. I remember helping my father do that. It was my job on the boat. Here, I’m an anxious spectator.

  “It’s a little over eighty to the bottom,” he says. “You don’t have to go that far. The wreck sits up off the sea floor, so it’s less than sixty down to the conning tower. Besides, there’s not much good shelling this shallow unless you get pretty remote. It’s all been picked over. But you can see the wreck, and if you’re comfortable hanging out for a few minutes at depth, I can show you where I used to make my finds.”

  “I thought you’d be with me the whole time.”

  “I will. If you don’t feel comfortable, we can come right back up. Just give me this sign.” Ness points straight up. “Do it with both hands, if possible. If you don’t feel like you’re getting air for any reason, do this.” He makes a choking gesture.

  “Comforting,” I say.

  “And if everything is okay, give the okay sign. If you give me a thumbs-up, I won’t know if you’re doing great or you want to go up to the boat.”

  “Sixty feet, ten minutes,” I tell him.

  “It’s a guideline,” Ness says. “Don’t worry if you go a little below that or stay down fifteen minutes. It gives you a lot of leeway. We won’t be long, and we’ll come up nice and slow, maybe even make a couple safety stops just to make my dearly departed dive master happy.”

  “Whatever’s the safest, that’s what I want to do.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll be perfectly safe. Trust me.”

  I try to. He and I drag our duffels to the stern of the boat and begin setting out the gear. There’s a small door on one side of the outboards and a narrow dive platform. I figure out how to work the door, and I kick the stainless steel ladder hinged to the platform into the water. Somehow, effecting my doom lessens the worry. Nerves are like carsickness: I get less nauseated if it’s my hands on the wheel.

  Ness starts prepping his tank, and I do the same with mine, repeating the steps I learned just an hour or so ago. I appreciate that he lets me do it myself, but I make sure he’s keeping an eye on me. I assume he’ll tell me if I do anything wrong. When I crack the valve on the tank, there’s a brief sputter of air, and then the rubber gasket catches tight.