by Anna Roberts
“How on earth do you swing that?”
Gabe pulled out a long boat hook and stretched it out towards a large, orange buoy. “Easy. We just tell the moon story to the tourists and they lap that shit up. Local color. Total bullshit, but it gives them a story to tell when they go back to Wisconsin or Kansas or wherever.” He jumped down into the bottom of the boat and pulled over the diving equipment. “Kate bitched the air blue about it at first but then there was the accident.”
“Accident?”
He picked up the sunscreen. “Lift your hair,” he said. “I need to get your back. When you’re face down in the water it’s the first thing to burn.”
She did as she was told, the steady motion of the waves beneath her doing nothing to settle either her nerves or her stomach. “What accident?” she said.
“You know that Palm Court place down the beach?” he said, his hands smoothing over her back with a businesslike touch. “Well, when Kate first bought this place they were our direct competition. And they were killing it. They’d take people out no matter what shape the moon was in and Kate was pissed; she actually sat me down and told me if I didn’t step up and do full moon cruises then she was going to fire me and find an instructor who would.”
“So you did?”
She felt his breath on the back of her neck as he exhaled. “Nuh uh,” he said. “But the Palm Court guy did. Think he was from Key Largo or something. Whatever – he wasn’t superstitious. He took these honeymooners out on the second day of the full moon; some yuppie kids from North Carolina. And that’s when it all went wrong.” He slapped her lightly on the back of the shoulder. “Okay, you’re done.”
Blue turned. “Thanks. But what do you mean? Went wrong?”
“Well, she drowned,” said Gabe. “The bride. Or at least that’s what they said. They found water in her lungs but I guess it could just have easily been hypercapnia. Dead space. You see, you don’t use all of your lungs when you breathe out. You only exhale a certain percentage of the air you breathe in, right?”
“Right,” she said, wondering what on earth had possessed her to come out here in the first place. There was no way she was getting in the water now. Not in a million years.
Gabe picked up a snorkel and held it up to his mouth. “What happens sometimes is that people breathe in through the snorkel, like so.” He demonstrated. “Then they exhale through it the same way. See? That way the CO2 you breathe out gets caught in the tube and when you breathe in you breathe it back. It fills up the dead spaces in your lungs and you get hypercapnia, which is basically CO2 poisoning. You get confused, sluggish, dizzy, weak and eventually – if you don’t get out and start breathing normally again – dead.”
Blue was aware that she probably looked like a rabbit in the headlights, but she couldn’t seem to remember how to blink. Gabe looked perfectly cheerful, like he was teaching a fun science class to a bunch of enthusiastic sixth graders.
“And you want me to get in the water?” she said.
“Relax. I won’t let you die.”
“Good. Thank you. That’s...very nice of you.”
He laughed. “I told you – I know what I’m doing. All you have to do is remember to exhale through your nose from time to time.”
“I don’t think I can - ”
“- you can.” He handed her a snorkel. “In through the tube, out through the nose. If the tube fills with water you need to clear it. Just a hard, sharp breath out – like you’re saying the word ‘two’, but hard. That’s it.”
She felt dizzy already. “Am I really going to let you talk me into this?”
He patted her shoulder. “It’s fine. You’ll be surprised how shallow it is when you’re in. We’re right on the reef. And it’s worth it. Believe me.” He dipped a mask in the water and handed it to her. “Here’s the disgusting part; spit in it.”
“Spit?”
“Yep. Spit in it and just rub it around in there. Stops it from fogging up.”
When she tried to summon enough spit the feel of it in her mouth was enough to set her off feeling queasy again, so in her determination to look normal she spat maybe harder than she needed to. She swallowed hard as she did as directed, rubbing the saliva around in the mask with her thumb. The boat rolled once more and she wanted to be back in the hotel, with the soothing smell of bleach in the background, keeping at bay all the phantom stinks of that sad, drowned world.
The mask seemed to suck at the edges of her eyes, but Gabe said that was good. Meant it was watertight.
“Okay,” he said, sitting on the side of the boat, strange and froglike in swimfins. “When we go over the side, I want you to keep your body parallel to the sea bed, okay? Like you’re lying flat face down in the water. Don’t put your feet down, whatever you do, because you might touch the coral.”
“Why? Will it hurt?”
“It hurts the coral worse,” he said. “You can destroy forty years growth of live coral with a single touch. It’s that delicate, so you must never touch it, okay?”
She nodded. Was this really happening? Was she really going to deliberately fall off a boat in the middle of the ocean like this? What if she got swept away? She wanted to tell him no, that she was afraid, but that would lead to a whole bunch of things she wasn’t ready to tell him. Or anyone.
“Remember what we talked about,” he said. “Exhale through your nose, or you wind up breathing your own air back.”
“Right,” she said, trying to remember everything. It seemed overwhelming. “Oh God. This is really happening, isn’t it?”
He grinned, his teeth bright white in the sunshine. “Relax. I’ll be holding your hand the whole way. In through the tube, out through the nose. Keep your feet up, your body parallel and enjoy the show, okay?”
She took a deep breath and realized that the next one she took would be underwater. His hand was there – extended towards her, and she took it. He smiled briefly, his face lumpy and distorted by the mask and snorkel, and then they fell backwards together into the water.
The first thing she saw was bubbles and she was immediately conscious of her feet – get them up, get them away from the coral – but then she lost Gabe’s hand. For a second she almost panicked but then somehow she got turned around and the sight that greeted her was so beautiful that even if she had needed to breathe right away, she might have forgotten how.
His hand was in hers again. She tentatively sucked air in through the snorkel and was amazed to find it worked. In through the tube, out through the nose. Got it.
She hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t this. She had imagined some murky dive in empty waters, interesting only to aficionados, but instead it was like she had fallen backwards into a giant tropical fish tank.
Jewel bright fish darted in and out of the coral – blue and yellow, black and red. Beneath her was a large greenish coral, all complicated creases like the surface of a brain. Swaying fronds of red and green seaweed and then a shimmering shoal of tiny fish, flashing out so fast that they made her breath come out in a series of surprised bubbles. Gabe gently tugged her hand and pointed, and there – just a little way away, shot through with the sunlight beaming through the crystal blue water - was a jellyfish. A big, wide-brimmed, pink-trimmed cellophane crinoline of a thing, fragile and beautiful as the reef itself, long stinging tendrils floating out beneath it.
It was so overwhelming that she almost wanted to go back up; she only had one pair of eyes and there was just so much to look at; disc shaped black fish with white, disdainful lips, electric blue tail fins beating through the waves, so many shapes and shades of coral that she thought her mind would burst with trying to absorb it all. Then, when she thought she had seen it all, there was a turtle, spotted flippers rowing over the reef with stately antique grace.
When they came back up she was amazed she had ever been afraid to go under.
“Cool, huh?” said Gabe, when she was clumsily flopping back into the boat, a sad comedown from floating beneat
h the waves.
Blue pulled back her mask, scrunching her eyes against the sunlight. “Cool? Slight understatement.”
He laughed. “Knew you’d get a kick out of it,” he said, slipping off his fins.
“I had no idea. I didn’t expect to see so much on the first go.”
“That’s reefs for you. Ecologists don’t yell about them so much just because they’re pretty; they’re heaving with all kinds of life. There’s stuff down there that hasn’t even been discovered yet.”
“Seriously?”
He shook the water out of his hair. “Oh yeah. I know it seems like we’ve been everywhere – both poles, top of Mount Everest. Even the moon. But when you look at an ecosystem like that you just know there’s stuff we haven’t found; Mother Nature still has plenty of tricks up her sleeve.”
“It’s incredible,” she said, still dizzy with everything she’d seen. “I don’t know how to thank you for this.”
Gabe grinned and pulled out a cooler from under the seat. “Oh, that’s easy,” he said, opening the lid to reveal a handful of beers bobbing in half melted ice. “I figured I was going to ask you out for a drink at some point, but now’s as good a time as any, I guess.”
She laughed. “Do you always take girls out on the reefs before asking them out for drinks?”
He handed her a Peroni, the label almost peeled off in the wet. “Only the ones I want to see again,” he said.
5
They could smell it a dozen or more miles away.
It carried on the wind – a fleshy scent that almost made your mouth water, until the sweetness of rot came and poked you in the back of the throat like a blunt finger, tripping your gag reflex and leaving you with no question about what it was you were smelling.
The black dog was walking.
“I heard they saw it down in the Keys.”
“Nah, man – it was here. Right here. I seen the fucker plain as daylight – paws like dinner plates, eyes like nothing you’ve ever seen on earth. Walked straight past my front door and growled at me. I just about pissed my pants.”
One of the younger ones shook his head. “Come on,” he said, one eye on his iPhone. “There is no black dog. It’s a fuckin’ superstition.”
“Oh yeah? Then what are you doing here?”
“Dude, how the hell should I know?” He jabbed at the screen with an impatient finger. “I can’t explain it. It’s like an instinct. Like how some things migrate, you know?” Another jab.
Charlie reached past him and grabbed a pack of baby carrots from the shelf. “Migrate?” he said. “What are you? Some kind of weregoose?”
A couple of the others laughed, but the youngster didn’t look up. Like a lot of the kids he looked dazed, blinking in the lights of the convenience store as if he had only just woken up. “Wait a sec,” he said. “I’m trying to get Wikipedia.”
“Yeah,” said Charlie. “Try ‘weird smells that make you drive to Florida’. That should be good for a laugh, if nothing else.”
He carried on through the aisles, his stomach roaring in protest as he passed by Twinkies, peanut butter cups, Cheetos and Little Debbie snack cakes. The ferocious appetite came with the moon, but he couldn’t afford the cholesterol, not at his age.
When he caught sight of himself in a mirror he saw that his cheeks were still gratifyingly hollow. Good bones. At thirty-two he was a long way from the blue-eyed golden boy he had been at twenty-five, his hair already turning tow-colored with streaks of premature gray. And sure, his teeth had never been up to Hollywood snuff, but he had the bone structure there. If you had great cheekbones you were much less likely to turn jowly.
He grabbed a couple of bags of beef jerky - for protein - and then headed for the counter. The girl behind it was a skinny little blue haired thing with old cutting scars on her wrist and the word BREATHE tattooed in loopy black letters on the inside of one arm. Her eyes were large and brown and the sight of her sloppy dark red lipstick set Charlie’s stomach rumbling again, stirring other appetites to life. Shaved, he thought. Not very well shaved, so she’d be just a little prickly to fuck, but it wouldn’t matter, because she was nutty enough to cut herself. Crazy in the head meant crazy in the bed.
“Gimme a pack of Marlboro, hon,” he said. He spotted the cool cabinet beside her and caved. “You know what – fuck it. And one of those bottles of tea. Sick of that sugarless Yankee shit I’ve been drinking.”
When she turned back the chill had tightened her nipples and he grinned at her across the counter. “I like sweet things,” he said.
She flinched at his smile the way they often did, these fucking kids with their weird notions that everyone should look like they’d been airbrushed or whatever. Like she was a goddamn picture, with her lipstick all over her teeth and her bra strap hanging off her shoulder.
There was a warm wind blowing in the parking lot, wafting the carrion breath over them all. A couple of old timers – bike kuttes, white streaked beards – were talking as he passed.
“...well, there’s the boy, I guess...”
“...that fatass kid? He even old enough?”
“About twenty, I think.”
The geezers spotted him and stopped talking. Charlie bared his yellow fangs at them and strolled on by. They looked guilty as shit at being caught out gossiping, or maybe it was because of the ill-concealed excitement in their tone.
He turned on his heel and yelled back to them. “Smell that?” he said, breathing in a mouthful of heady-sweet sickness. “Huff it on up. That’s the wind of change, fellas. Wind of change.”
Charlie laughed, spun around and kept on going. Change. Such an exciting word that that asshole in the White House had managed to wring two fucking terms out of it. Tell people that the world is about to somehow shift and heave under their feet and watch them scurry around like ants. Nobody wanted to admit it, but there was a fiesta atmosphere in the air, adrenaline flowing like champagne fizz, quickening tongues and bating breath. Big news. Big change.
He found Grayson waiting by the truck, sad-dog brown eyes behind Buddy Holly glasses, a cigarette held between knuckles that already had the tell-tale bunchy look of early arthritis. Turning was hell on the bones.
“So?” said Charlie. “He dead yet?”
Grayson blinked. “Did I ever tell you how much I appreciate your sensitivity to social atmosphere?” His British accent struck a discordant chilly note in the swampy Florida air.
“Says the man catching a deathbed smoke break,” said Charlie. “You just left Reese alone in there with him?”
“They were having a moment. Father/son stuff.”
Charlie shook out his own pack of smokes, flipped one round upside down. For luck. For what that was worth. “If it was anyone but Reese,” he said. “I’d suspect the kid of holding a pillow over the old man’s face.”
“Please. Reese might not be the sharpest crayon in the box but he’s not that fucking stupid.” Grayson looked out across the parking lot at the assembled bikes and trucks and shitbox cars. “Jesus, look at all of them.”
“Lyle was...is...a respected guy.”
Grayson arched an eyebrow. “Respected? Or feared?”
“Potato, potahto.” Charlie rested his cigarette on his lip as he lowered the tailgate. Smoke billowed up into his eyes, stinging. “It’s not too late to call the whole thing off.”
He lugged the toolbox off the back. The lid was rusted and the handle in danger of falling off, but he knew the things inside gleamed like treasures. He had spent hours sharpening the blades, sometimes going so hard at it that tiny sparks danced off the edge of the metal. Beautiful clean edges, so sharp that you could touch them to skin and not even know you were cut until you saw the red trickle out.
“I bought a new couch,” said Grayson, seemingly apropos of nothing.
“Okay?”
“It’s a nice couch. Italian leather. And I was thinking of retiling the kitchen.”
“Mazeltov,” said Charlie. “What’s
your point?”
“My point is that I like my life,” said Grayson. “Or at least I don’t hate it nearly as much as I used to. You just wait – when you get to my age you’ll start measuring happiness in terms of comfy chairs and indigestion remedies.”
“Nope. When I’m your age I’ll be dead. If this all goes south then I’m going down to Islamorada to hook up with some old smuggling buddies and to drink myself to death on umbrella drinks. You know – with fuckin’ pipecleaner flamingos and shit.”
Grayson frowned, notching the line between his eyebrows deeper. “Ever the optimist.”
“That’s me,” said Charlie, stamping out his smoke and heading for the motel room door. “You gotta look on the bright side.”
“Yes, because it’s always a barrel of monkeys when a mad dictator croaks. The power vacuums, the infighting, the pretenders to the throne circling like vultures. Not to mention the extremes of lawless violence. If we’re really lucky we’ll only end up shot in a basement like the Romanovs.”
The smell got stronger as Charlie approached the door. Number seven, a lucky number that wasn’t doing anyone inside any favors, not if the smell was anything to go by. It was close now; there was a poison tang to the smell of blood that said Lyle’s kidneys were shutting down, if they hadn’t quit already.
Reese opened the door. The first thing Charlie thought was that the geezers had been wrong; there was no way Reese was anywhere near twenty. The kid hadn’t shaved in days and was showing a dumb, downy adolescent beard. There was a rosy rash at one corner of his mouth that just served to highlight the still pink, fresh scars of recent acne all over his anxious, flabby little face. He looked all of about sixteen years old.
“Oh my God,” he said, fresh tears welling in his red-rimmed eyes. “Oh my God, you weren’t kidding?”