The Deep

by Peter Benchley

  The interior of the shell was filled with stiff, gray, spaghetti-like strands, bunched tightly together.

  Coffin handed Treece a pair of pliers and a box of matches. Treece fished one of the strands from the shell casing and, holding it with the pliers, gave Sanders the matches. “Light it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Cordite. That’s what makes everything explode.”

  Sanders held a match to the end of the cordite strand. There was a flash, and the strand burned with the brilliance of magnesium.

  Gail said, “That’s all there is to a shell that big?”

  “All? Christ, girl, pack a hundred of ’em together and touch a primer charge to ’em, and you can blow Bermuda to pieces.”

  “How many are there?”

  “No way to know,” Coffin said. “There was about ten ton when we started, but some of it’s been salvaged.”

  Treece tossed the cordite overboard. It hissed as it hit the water, and, sinking, emitted a stream of bubbles.

  They fetched the air hoses from the water and coiled them on the deck. Treece fastened the air-lift tube to the gunwale, then started the engine. Charlotte, who had been sleeping on the bow, lurched to her feet and—like a soldier reluctantly assuming a midnight watch—took her post on the pulpit.

  Coffin hoisted the anchor, and Treece eased the boat through the reefs and headed for shore.

  “What time tomorrow?” Coffin said.

  “Early. Say eight o’clock. We’ll do four or five hours in the morning, dry off for the afternoon, and start again around six.” He teased Coffin. “I know you old folks need your afternoon nap.”

  “The hell you say!” The boat was still seventy-five yards from shore. “I’ll outlast ’em all.” Coffin hopped onto the gunwale and dove overboard.

  Treece watched, grinning, until he saw Coffin surface and start to swim toward shore. Then he swung the boat seaward.

  As the boat rose and fell in the gentle swells, something slid off the steering console and clattered to the deck: the escutcheon plate. Gail picked it up and handed it to Treece.

  “Lordy, I almost forgot about that,” he said, adding, with a smile at Sanders, “what with all the excitement caused by the daredevil shark hunter.”

  “Adam said it was a plate that went around a lock.”

  “Aye, but not just any lock. I’ve heard of these, but I’ve never seen one. I don’t know that any others still exist. It was called a three-lock box. See the three keyholes; it took three keys to open the lock.”

  Sanders said, “What was the point of that?”

  “To keep one or two people from making off with the goodies inside. Three partners, three keys. Say someone was sending something from the New World back to Spain. The King had a master set, all three keys. The man in wherever it was—Havana—probably had two, the captain of the ship one. They locked the box in Havana, and the captain took it aboard ship. He couldn’t open it with only one key. When he got to Spain, he presented the box to the King.”

  “Wouldn’t be hard to pry open.”

  “No, but they didn’t usually. The Spaniards took locks as . . . well, not holy, but special. The British and Dutch sent documents and what-all back and forth in regular boxes; if a ship was pirated, that was that. No lock would do any good. The Spaniards locked everything, almost symbolically. But a three-lock box!” Treece ran his fingers over the escutcheon plate. “Aye, that is interesting.”

  “Why?”

  “It means there was something very damned important in that box. More’n likely, something very damned important to the King of Spain.”

  C H A P T E R

  I X

  By the time they tied up to Treece’s dock, the sun was resting on the western horizon, a swollen ball of orange.

  Treece sniffed the evening air and said, “Going to get messy tomorrow.”

  Sanders’ impulse was to ask Treece how he knew the weather would change, but by now he could anticipate the answer, something like “Got a feeling” or “You can smell a breeze coming.” So he said instead, “How bad?”

  “Maybe twenty knots, out of the south. It’ll bounce us around a fair amount.”

  “Can we work?”

  “Got no choice. Cloche’ll be working, you can bet on that. It’ll be all right; we’ll weight-up heavy.”

  Sanders began to peel off his wet-suit pants, but Treece stopped him.

  “We’re not done yet.”

  “We’re not?”

  “Got to put away the ampules. Can’t leave ’em lying around on the boat.”

  “I know, but I figured . . .” He stopped when he saw Treece pointing overboard at the dark water. “Oh.”

  “I want you to know where they are, in case something happens to me.”

  “What’s going to happen to you?”

  “Who knows? Maybe a terminal case of the ague, or a sudden onset of heebie-jeebies. Maybe nothing. It’s just insurance. There’s a cave underwater at the base of the cliff. Tide washes it, but if we put ’em way back and bury ’em, they’ll stay.” He turned to Gail. “You don’t need to come.”

  “I can,” she said, “if you want me to.”

  “No. You’ll be more use up here, passing bags to us.”

  They rigged two scuba tanks and brought the bags of ampules up from below. Treece half-filled the canvas bags, then handed Sanders a flashlight. “Overweight yourself,” he said. “That bag’ll want to come to the surface. Adam squeezed all the air he could out of the plastic bags, but you can’t get every last bit. If you’re way heavy, you can let your weights drag you and the bag to the bottom. When you get down, follow my light.”

  “Okay.”

  Treece pointed to a rectangular wooden box on the dock and said to Gail, “Fetch me a fish out of that box.”

  “A fish?”

  “Aye, It’s full of salted fish. I keep ’em there for Percy. He lives in the cave.”

  Gail climbed onto the dock and opened the lid of the wooden box. The smell of fish made her step backward and hold her breath.

  “Pick a big one,” Treece caled. “Want to keep him occupied so he doesn’t take a shine to us.”

  “What’s Percy?” Sanders asked.

  “A frightful big moray eel, a green. He’s lived in that cave long as I can remember. We get along all right, but he’s a hungry bastard, and I like to keep on his good side by giving him dinner now and again.”

  Gail reached into the fish box and grabbed the largest tail she saw. She swallowed, to keep from gagging. “Don’t you keep ice?”

  “No need. Salt keeps ’em fine.” Treece took the fish from her. “That ought to keep him busy for a while.” He said to Sanders, “Let me go in first. I want to see him, make sure he knows what’s going on. Let a bastard like that blind-side you, it’ll be a nasty evening. And don’t go sticking your hands in any holes. For all I know, he’s got relatives in there sharing the rent with him.” He lowered his mask over his face, rolled off the gunwale, resurfaced, and reached for bag, fish, and light.

  Sanders followed immediately and found, as Treece had said, that the extra weight and the air trapped in the plastic bags roughly counterbalanced each other, so he sank without effort.

  The cove was not deep—fifteen or, at most, twenty feet, Sanders estimated as he watched the beam from his light move between the sandy bottom and the boat above. The canvas bag was cumbersome: it tugged at his left arm, so Sanders pressed it against his stomach and followed Treece’s receding light.

  Treece waited at the entrance to the cave—a dark hole, taller than a man, in the craggy face of the cliff. When Sanders joined him, Treece shined his light into the cave and swung it from side to side. At first, the cave seemed to be empty—pocked gray limestone walls extending thirty feet into the darkness. Then Treece fixed his light on a back corner of the cave and pointed with his finger, and Sanders saw something move.

  Slowly, Treece swam into the cave, holding the fish in front of him. Sanders tra
iled a few feet behind.

  At the base of one wall there was a heap of rocks, the result of a partial collapse of the wall ages ago. Treece held the fish up to the wall.

  The snout of the moray emerged from a crevice between the rocks and the wall. Sanders had seen morays in aquariums, but never anything to rival the size of the green body that now slithered out of the crevice. It was more than a foot thick, top to bottom, and at least six inches wide.

  The moray writhed and twisted until it had extricated as much of itself—about four feet—as it intended to. Then it hung suspended from the rocks, glancing, with its cold pig eyes, at Sanders, at Treece, at the fish. The mouth opened and closed rhythmically, exposing the long needle teeth joined by viscid, mucuous strands that glittered in the light. The head tilted slightly and—so quickly that, afterward, Sanders would not recall having seen it move—seized the fish.

  Treece did not let go; he held the fish just forward of the tail. The moray pulled, then stopped, then suddenly began to spin its body, like a rug unrolling, until a chunk of fish belly tore away. The eel backed off, swallowing, its teeth forcing the flesh back into its throat, green skin rippling with the effort. Then it struck again, this time grabbing the fish’s backbone, and yanked the fish from Treece’s grasp. It tried to retreat into its hole, but the fish was too big to fit sideways through the crevice, so the moray contented itself with jamming its prey into the narrow opening and dismembering it from below.

  Treece motioned for Sanders to follow him, and, reluctant as he was to turn his back, in darkness, on the moray. Sanders obeyed.

  The roof of the cave was about eight feet high, and Sanders saw the beam from Treece’s light shine on it, then saw Treece’s canvas bag floating upward to it. The bag nudged the roof and rested against it. Sanders reached up and placed his own bag next to Treece’s, then joined Treece on the bottom.

  They dug a wide, deep hole in the sand and dumped the bags of ampules into it. They leveled off the hole with sand, to keep the bags from floating free, then returned to the boat.

  They made three more trips, each time digging a new hole. When they left the cave at the end of the last trip, the moray had devoured all but the last few inches of the fish: the tail still protruded from the crevice, quivering as it was bitten from beneath.

  “How big is that thing?” Sanders asked when they were aboard the boat.

  “Percy? Never seen the whole of him, but I bet he’s all of ten feet. Soon as it gets full dark, he’ll come out and prowl around. Some night we can go down and see him when he comes out.”

  “No, thanks. He looks mean enough in his hole. I don’t want to meet him in the open.”

  “What? I thought you shark killers didn’t know the meaning of fear.”

  “Look, dammit . . .” Sanders was annoyed at Treece’s needling, wanted him to stop, but was not eager to provoke a confrontation, nor to beg.

  “Don’t get all fired up,” Treece said. He snapped his fingers at the dog, and she jumped from the boat onto the dock. “Lead the way, Charlotte. See if there’s any brigands lurking.” The dog trotted happily toward the path, sniffing at the underbrush.

  Treece pulled the two empty air tanks from the rack and set them on the dock. “Best fill these tonight.”

  When they reached the house, they saw a paper-wrapped package outside the kitchen door. Treece picked it up, smelled it, and said, “Supper.”

  “Fish?” Gail asked, queasy from the recollection of the fish box on the dock.

  “No. Meat.” Treece opened the door and held it for them.

  Gail said, “Don’t you ever lock your door?”

  “No. Like I told you, only the Spanish have faith in locks.”

  Inside, Treece said to Sanders, “Fix me a bit of rum while I throw this beast on the fire.”

  “Sure.” Sanders said to Gail, “You want anything?”

  “Not yet. I’d like to take a shower. I feel like a week-old bass.”

  “Know how to work the heater?” Treece said.

  “Heater?”

  “There’s a gas heater next to the stall. Turn the valve half a turn clockwise and wait about two minutes. That’ll start warming it, and by the time you’re finished showering, it’ll be nice and hot.”

  “Thanks.” Gail left the kitchen.

  Sanders handed Treece a glass of rum and sipped at his scotch. “Anything I can do?”

  “No. Rest your bones.”

  Sanders sat at the table and watched Treece light the stove, pour oil into a frying pan, drop in the meat, and dust it with herbs.

  When he was satisfied that the meat was cooking properly, Treece turned away from the stove and looked at Sanders. “What’s pecking at your shell?”

  “What?” Sanders didn’t understand.

  “With the shark business. What are you looking for?”

  Sanders thought: Oh Christ, here we go again. “Nothing. It was stupid. I know that.” He hoped his admission would end the conversation.

  “I think there’s more,” Treece said. “I think, inside you, you think you did something ballsy.”

  Sanders blushed, for Treece was right. Beneath the knowledge that he had acted stupidly, impetuously, dangerously, there was a little-boy’s pride at having stabbed a shark. Though he would not say so, he had even fantasized about how he would shape the story for telling to friends. He said nothing.

  “It’s natural enough,” Treece said. “A lot of people want to prove something to themselves, and when they do something they think’s impressive, then they’re impressed themselves. The mistake is, what you do isn’t the same as what you are. You like to do things just to see if you can. Right?”

  Though there was no reproach in Treece’s voice, Sanders was embarrassed. “Sometimes. I guess . . .”

  “What I’m getting at . . .” Treece paused. “The feeling’s a lot richer when you do something right, when you know something has to be done and you know what you’re doing, and then you do something hairy. Life’s full of chances to hurt yourself or someone else.” Treece took a drink. “In the next few days, you’ll have more chances to hurt yourself than most men get in a lifetime. It’s learning things and doing things right that make it worthwhile, make a man easy with himself. When I was young, nobody could tell me anything. I knew it all. It took a lot of mistakes to teach me that I didn’t know goose shit from tapioca. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-seven.”

  “That’s not young, but it’s not next door to the grave. You could start now, and spend another forty years learning about the sea without running out of new things to know. That’s the only hitch in learning: it’s humbling The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know.” Treece drained his glass and stood to refill it. “Anyway, all that’s a long way around saying that it’s crazy to do things just to prove you can do ’em. The more you learn, the more you’ll find yourself doing things you never thought you could do in a million years.”

  Sanders nodded. He didn’t know whether Treece’s attitude toward him had changed, or his interpretation of Treece’s attitude had changed. He felt curiously privileged, and he said, “Thank you.”

  Treece seemed flustered by the remark. He snapped his fingers and said, “The tanks. I almost forgot. Better get that monster fired up now, or she’ll be chugging away all night.”

  Sanders followed him out the door and stood with him while he started the compressor and attached the two scuba tanks.

  When they returned to the kitchen, Gail was making herself a drink. Her feet were bare and she wore a cotton bathrobe. Sanders kissed her neck; it smelled of soap.

  “You taste good,” he said.

  “I feel good, all but my sinuses.”

  “Headache?” Treece asked.

  “Not a real headache. Up here.” She touched the bones above her eyes. “They feel stuffed up. It hurts to touch them.”

  “Aye, they’re abused. Adam’ll dive tomorrow. You can tan yourself.” Treece turned the mea
t in the frying pan, reached into a bin beneath the sink, and took out an assortment of vegetables: beans, cucumbers, squash, onions, and tomatoes. He sliced them over a mixing bowl, added a dose of dressing, and stirred the brew with a fork.

  The meat was dark red, almost purple, and it tasted strong.

  “Do you hang your beef here?” Gail asked, dipping a piece of meat into the salad dressing, to mellow the flavor.

  “I don’t know. Why?”

  “I just wondered.”

  “Like it?”

  “It’s . . . interesting.”

  “It’s not beef, y’know.”

  “Oh?” she said uneasily. “What is it?”

  “Goat.” Treece cut a chunk of meat, put it in his mouth, and chewed happily.

  “Oh.” Gail’s stomach churned, and she looked at Sanders. He had been about to take a bite of meat, but now his fork was stopped a few inches from his mouth.

  He saw her looking at him, and he held his breath, put the meat in his mouth, and swallowed it whole.

  After supper, Treece put his plate in the sink and said, “I’m going for a stroll; probably see Kevin for a while. No need for you to wait up.”

  “Anything we can do?” Gail asked.

  “No. Enjoy yourselves.” He wiped his hands on his pants and took a bottle of rum from the cabinet. “Kevin drinks palm wine, home brew. Rot your insides faster’n naval jelly.” He clucked at the dog, who was sleeping under the table, and said, “Let’s go.” The dog struggled to her feet, stretched, yawned, and followed Treece out the kitchen door.

  When the gate had closed, and the sound of Treece’s footsteps had faded away, Sanders said, “Nice of him.”

  “What?”

  “To leave us alone.” He reached across the table and took her hand.

  She neither withdrew her hand nor responded to his touch. “Treece was married,” she said, and then she told him the story Coffin had told her.

  As he listened, Sanders remembered his conversation with Treece, and he realized that what had seemed like friendly advice had been genuine, heartfelt concern, that Treece had been trying to guide him away from a course that he, Treece, had taken and that had deprived him, forever, of the promise of joy. Realizing this, Sanders felt a cold fear unalloyed by the thrill of adventure.