by Watt Key
50
On the ride home Dad drove the beach road. The sky was clear, and through my open window I saw the Gulf waves rolling gently over the sand. Tourist cars lined the way, and I could hear the scattered voices of children and see several kites flutter over the dunes.
Dad pulled into the dive shop. I hadn’t seen it since the morning of our accident. He turned off Brownie and sat there for a moment, staring at the sign on the front door: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
“Dad?” I finally said.
“I’m not sure what to do about it anymore, Julie.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, here we are. We’ve got the Malzon tanks. Your mother’s back. And now I wonder if it’s all worthwhile.”
“Have you paid the bills?”
“Your mother came over and went through everything. She said she got most of it handled.”
“How’s the Barbie Doll?”
“Well, with everything that’s been going on—you know, with you missing and my health being bad—I haven’t taken any trips out since the accident.”
“You want to check on it?”
“Sort of,” he said. “Sort of not.”
“Come on,” I said. “We can’t just let her rot and sink out there.”
I got out of the pickup and heard Dad get out behind me. He followed me around the side of the building, where I stopped and gazed out at the bayou while waiting for him to catch up. The Barbie Doll floated safely in her usual spot, though I could already tell from a distance that she was starting to gather mildew on her white paint and gray oxidation splotches on her hardware.
“We ought to at least crank it up, I guess,” Dad said, “while we’re here.”
I continued toward the dock and sensed Dad dragging behind like a part of him was reluctant to approach. I stepped down onto the stern deck and felt the old boat sway and creak like it had gotten a lot older in just the time I’d been gone.
I turned back to see Dad standing above me on the dock. “You coming?”
He didn’t answer me, and I saw he was tearing up.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and I could tell he was struggling to keep from crying in front of me.
“I just didn’t know,” he said, wiping his eyes again. “I just didn’t know how it would be when you got back.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“I mean, we don’t have to do this. It’s not important to me anymore. Not if you don’t want to. I wouldn’t mind if you never wanted to go out on the water again.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Dad. I don’t feel that way.”
“You don’t?”
I shook my head. “I just know what you always taught me was right. You have to be safe out there. And even that’s not always enough. But it’s no reason to quit doing what you love.”
“So you’d go out there again?”
“I was scared. I was scared the whole time. But never once did I want either one of us to give up what we do. Yes, of course I’ll go out there again.”
Dad nodded to himself and sniffled. He stepped down onto the deck and looked around at the boat like it was something he was thinking about buying. A boat he was seeing for the first time.
“You really feel that way?” he said.
“Yes,” I said. “And so does Mom. She came back for us to do this. To try to make it work. To make it all really work.”
Dad didn’t look at me, but he reached over and put his big arm around me and pulled me close. Then I felt myself starting to tear up, too. I felt how much he wanted us all together again and how empty and worthless his life had been without Mom and me. Now I knew why I had fought so hard to survive both in the water and on the rig. I had two people back on land who needed me to come home.
He gave me a final squeeze and backed away. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get started.”
THE INSPIRATION BEHIND DEEP WATER
When I was sixteen years old I was stranded after a scuba dive, a situation resulting from circumstances much like you find in this story.
Two friends and I had taken a seventeen-foot boat nine miles out into the Gulf of Mexico. We didn’t have a GPS or any navigation electronics on board. All we had was a compass. We had been told by a scuba instructor that if we headed due south from Orange Beach, Alabama, until we could no longer see land we would be nine miles offshore and in proximity of a sunken ship called the Allen. The Allen is 440 feet long, one of several World War II supply ships sunk in 90 feet of water to create an artificial reef for recreational purposes. These ships are popular with fishermen and scuba divers. Our plan was to get out there early and find a commercial dive charter already anchored. Then, once they finished their dives, we’d hurry over and take their place.
My friend Archie and I had been certified scuba divers for a couple of years. Also with us was a boy from Mississippi named Dean, whom I’d just met. Dean was the son of one of my mother’s school friends, in town for a brief visit. He didn’t know much about boats, much less scuba diving. He just happened to be along for the ride.
That day the Gulf was a calm surface of gentle swells and the skies were blue. Once we lost sight of land it didn’t take long to locate a charter boat flying the red-and-white dive flag that means they’re anchored with divers in the water. We kept our distance until we saw them preparing to leave. Then we pulled alongside and dropped our own anchor just as they were pulling away.
The water was clear enough to see the anchor rope streaming down toward the seafloor, but not so clear that we could see the ship below. It took about thirty seconds for all the rope to spool out. Then Archie put the boat in reverse to make sure the anchor was set and holding. We saw right away that it wasn’t. And just a pull on the rope revealed that it hadn’t even touched bottom.
Fortunately the current wasn’t bad, so we had time to lengthen the anchor rope with a ski rope and drop it again before we drifted too far out of position. Then Archie and I got into our scuba gear, grabbed our spearguns, and rolled off. We swam down the anchor rope and soon found ourselves facing the giant sunken hull of the Allen.
We had a great dive. The visibility was good and we speared a stringerful of fish. But when we returned to the anchor to start our ascent, we knew right away that something was wrong. The anchor rope, our lifeline to the surface, was limp. It had either broken or come untied.
We couldn’t afford to analyze what happened. We were running out of air and about to exceed the safe time limit for ninety feet. We had no choice but to start a free ascent immediately. Scuba ascents are done slowly so that your body has time to release deadly gases that have built up in your system during the dive. It was going to take us nearly twenty minutes to reach the surface. With free ascents it’s hard to control how fast you’re rising, and all the while the current is sweeping you away from the dive site. By the time we surfaced we were going to be tired and maybe lost.
When we finally broke into sunlight there was no one to be seen. The current wasn’t bad, so we doubted that we’d drifted far, but who knew how long it would take Dean to realize something was wrong. And even when he did realize it, we didn’t know if he could drive a boat.
The first thing we did was get rid of our fish so that the blood wouldn’t attract predators. Then I hung my mask at the end of my speargun and began waving it in the air while Archie watched below us for sharks.
After about fifteen minutes, in an unbelievable stroke of luck, a fishing boat happened to pass by and see us. We told the fishermen what happened, and from the higher vantage point of their boat, they were able to see Dean drifting about a quarter-mile away. They got us out of the water and took us to our boat, ending what could have been the start of our own Deep Water adventure.
As we suspected, Dean had never even known anything was wrong. After pulling up the ski rope, we saw that it and the anchor rope had come untied.
I’ve often wond
ered what would have happened that day if the fishing boat hadn’t come along—if we hadn’t been so fortunate. And that’s where this story came from.
BOOKS BY WATT KEY
Alabama Moon
Dirt Road Home
Fourmile
Terror at Bottle Creek
Hideout
Deep Water
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Albert Watkins Key, Jr., publishing under the name Watt Key, is an award-winning southern fiction author. He grew up and currently lives in southern Alabama with his wife and family. Watt spent much of his childhood hunting and fishing the forests of Alabama, which inspired his debut novel, Alabama Moon, published to national acclaim in 2006. Alabama Moon won the 2007 E.B. White Read-Aloud Award, was included on Time Magazine’s list of the Best One Hundred YA Books of All Time, and has been translated in seven languages. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Scuba Diver Schematic
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
The Inspiration Behind Deep Water
Also by Watt Key
About the Author
Copyright
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
An imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
Copyright © 2018 by Watt Key
Diver equipment drawing © 2018 by Charles Lehman
All rights reserved
First hardcover edition, 2018
eBook edition, April 2018
mackids.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Names: Key, Watt, author.
Title: Deep water: a story of survival / Watt Key.
Description: First edition. | New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2018. | Summary: When a dive off the coast of Alabama goes horribly wrong, twelve-year-old Julie and one of her father’s scuba clients struggle to survive after reaching an abandoned oil rig.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017023579 (print) | LCCN 2017038542 (ebook) | ISBN 9780374306564 (ebook) | ISBN 9780374306540 (hardcover)
Subjects: | CYAC: Survival—Fiction. | Scuba diving—Fiction. | Oil well drilling rigs—Fiction. | Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Family problems—Fiction. | Mexico, Gulf of—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PZ7.K516 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.K516 Dee 2018 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023579
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eISBN 9780374306564