“I want you to put a tail on that punk Loomis.”
“You got it, sir. I’ll get Binx and Ridly.”
“I don’t care who you get. Get somebody good. No dope fiends.”
“You got it, sir.”
“Is there any word on these Tamarind Financial punks, just who the fuck they are—were?”
“Not yet, sir, but your Jews are working on it.”
“Tell them hurry the fuck up, what’s taking them so long, there’s faster Jews where they come from.”
“You got it, sir.”
Big Al loved to see large men bow and scrape to him in his wheelchair. “And you be careful, Lucas. This punk is from New York, so he’s armed to the teeth.” Speaking of which, Big Al reminded himself to get Lucas’s teeth fixed. They were the sort of choppers you’d see in ancient mummy museums.
“Me too,” grinned Lucas brownly.
“You too, what?”
“Armed. To the teeth.”
“That’s all well and good, Lucas, but never, never be impetuous. Just remember you can kill more flies with honey than with—what? I forget.”
“…Kerosene?”
“Whatever. Just bear it in mind.”
“You got it, sir,” said Lucas. Did the old dinosaur fuck even so much as thank him for blowing up the shopping center? No, he did not. One day, Lucas determined, he would shoot this ancient asshole in the back of the neck while wheeling him to the john for a futile try at a shit.
SAFETY FIRST
Blew up!” Anne couldn’t believe the rotten luck. “While you were standing there?”
Anne couldn’t believe it either. “And where were we?”
“Stuck in traffic.”
Doom and the Annes sat in Staggerlee’s cockpit drinking coffee at dawn the next day. Doom studied a navigation chart of the area. For local color Anne shot some brown pelicans standing on the dock pilings waiting for a handout, but her heart wasn’t in it. “We need a new production vehicle.”
“We didn’t know it would be like this.”
“This congested.”
“It’s worse than the FDR Drive.”
“We can’t just sit sweltering.”
“In stasis.”
“How about a motorcycle?”
“My brother was killed on a motorcycle.”
“How about a bicycle built for two?”
“Would you mind if I went about my business alone today?” Doom asked after he had picked a likely-looking place on the chart. He had already committed one felony—grand theft VCR—and then there were Ozzie’s hot goods. To handle them with prior knowledge constituted accessory after the fact as well as conspiracy to transport stolen goods. To commit felonies on film constituted stupidity. Then there was his first diving lesson, scheduled for ten o’clock. He’d be nervous enough without having to explain the Annes to Rosalind.
Indeed, the Annes did mind. “It constitutes censorship,” said Anne.
“Maybe this film about me isn’t such a good idea. I’ll be leaving soon, anyway.”
“Oh, so you’re just going to sail away when your hometown really needs you?” said Anne.
“What can I do?”
“Those people in the hobby shop need you.”
“This sounds like editorial comment to me. What happened to cinéma vérité? I thought you filmed reality, not formed it. Besides, how do you figure they’re my responsibility?”
“Ownership implies responsibility.”
“…Ownership?”
“You own Omnium Settlement, don’t you?”
“How do you know that?”
“We do our research.”
“Our deep background.”
“Who told you, Bert or Marvis?”
“Bert and Marvis.”
Maybe there wasn’t even time to try to begin a relationship with Rosalind.
“He’s right, Anne. About the editorializing.”
“I know it.”
“We’re trying to mold events politically.”
“To fit our worldview.”
“We mustn’t.”
“I know it.”
“We felt censored.”
“It was reflexive.”
“The fact is,” said Doom, “I met a woman. My diving instructor. I’d like to get to know her before—well, before I get into Splendor and the movie.”
“A woman?”
“That’s different.”
“Why didn’t you say so?”
“It’s true, ours can be a disruptive medium.”
“Sometimes I wish we were poets.”
“With yellow notepads.”
The Annes seemed glum now. Doom hadn’t meant to precipitate a crisis of artistic faith, but time felt short.
“That’s the gink,” said Ridly.
“Where?” asked Binx.
“Right there—getting off that yacht—heading up the dock—that gink.”
“The sad-looking gink?”
“Do you see any other gink besides the sad-looking gink?”
Binx and Ridly sat in the parking lot aboard an idling (for the air-conditioning) Toyota. The smoke of controlled substance hung around their heads like Newfoundland fog. A passerby, like Doom, if he had looked, which he didn’t, couldn’t have seen into the backseat. Still, Binx lit another spliff and puff-puffed. He giggled over something obscure.
Ridly, on the other hand, felt bitter, aggrieved. “I should be an engineer,” he said. “A consulting engineer for a prestigious aerospace concern, two grand a day plus expenses. Instead I’m running errands for the likes of Lucas Hogaboom.”
“My brother Glen was spacey.”
“What?”
“Spacey. My brother Glen.”
“I should be a securities analyst. Buy short, sell long, eat sushis for lunch with high rollers.”
“The gink’s goin’ into the Flamingo Tongue.”
“No shit.”
“Hey, Ridly, what’s sushis?”
“Raw fish.”
“My brother Glen used to eat raw fish.”
Ridly sighed.
“It got so’s it was embarrassing. You’d go into a bank or someplace had an aquarium for decoration, and there’d be Glen—grabbin’ around in the water, plastic deep-sea divers, treasure chests opening and closing, till he caught one. Ate it wigglin’ in his fist. He said Siamese fighting fish was the best eatin’.”
“Jesus,” Ridly muttered. A man seeking advancement didn’t find it following guys for Lucas Hogaboom and smoking dope with Binx Bukowski, listening to stories about his brother Glen, who probably didn’t even exist. “Do you have a brother Glen?”
“It’s hard to say.”
“What’s so hard? You either do or you don’t.”
“I might. That’s all I can say for sure.”
The skippers were in their places drinking coffee at the counter, Archie and Dawn behind it. The Flamingo Tongue seemed to Doom a venerable, unchanging place in a fast-flowing tide of mutability. The skippers pivoted on their stools in unison and nodded genially. Doom used the john—it said Buoys for men, Gulls for women—and when he emerged Dawn was pouring him a cup while Archie set a paper place mat and utensils next to the skippers. Doom seemed to be a figure of slightly dangerous fascination to the Flamingo Tongue regulars, and he liked that.
“Could you tell me how to operate a marine head?”
The faintest breeze of a smile wafted over the skippers’ faces—a line like that didn’t come along every morning of the world. “Now that’s an important thing to know, you live on a boat,” said Arnie.
“I guess you know how to take a shit?”
“There are other words, Bobby,” said Archie.
“I was just wondering at what point to begin the lesson, Arch. So now I know.” To Doom, Bobby said, “You got to have that valve up while you do your business. Then you put it down to flush. And then you put that little valve back up. Pump, pump, pump her dry. Don’t go away unless that valve’s up. G
ot it?”
“Yes.”
“You could sink your boat you leave that valve open.”
“Remember Donny Potts?”
“Guy who’s paralyzed?”
“Paralyzed?”
“Yeah, Donny went to bed one night fine, next morning he woke up paralyzed.”
“I didn’t know he was paralyzed.”
“Stiff as a nacho chip.”
“Well, before he got paralyzed, Donny sunk his boat like that.”
“Left the valve down?”
“Yep. Down.”
“Donny had a drinking problem.”
“Donny didn’t have no problem drinking. His problem was stoppin’.” The skippers giggled without moving their mouths.
Archie turned somber. “Damn if that isn’t exactly what your daddy used to do. Sit right there drinking coffee, listening to their dumb stories.”
The phone rang.
“That’ll be for me,” said Doom.
“Okay, Doom boy, any decade now’d be fine,” said Ozzie.
“Do you have a boat?”
“A boat? Doris has a boat. Is this going to get weird?”
“Discretion—that’s the ticket, Ozzie.”
“Look, Doom, a thousand bucks cash to meet me in the parking lot of the Seven-fucking-Eleven on Cormorant Key. Next door to the bottle refund center.”
Doom refused, going on to outline his more prudent plan.
After Doom had hung up on Ozzie’s protests, Archie said, “I forgot to tell you, Doom. A couple guys were in here asking for you.”
A wave of fear churned the coffee in his stomach. Doom was kidding himself, and he knew it. That was what frightened him most. This sanguine torpor, this vaguely hopeful lassitude. Maybe it was the sun. He was totally vulnerable to assault by strangers with unknown motives, no matter what precautions he devised, and he had devised none. And now Bert and Marvis were shooting off their mouths about how he owned Omnium Settlement. Still, he stayed. “What did they look like?”
“Yankees,” said Billy.
“Might of been a Jew,” said Arnie.
“What did you tell them?” Doom asked Archie.
“Well, he—the one might have been a Jew—said you invited him down for a vacation. He said he was an old pal of yours.”
“Then you told him where to find me?”
“Yes…I hope that’s okay.” Doom’s expression seemed to say it wasn’t.
“What did the other one look like?” Doom asked.
“Old codger. Sat down in that booth over there and fell flat asleep.”
“Alzheimer’s,” pronounced Archie. “You see a lot of that down here.”
“Geezer starts wipin’ his teeth and brushin’ his ass—next stop’s the home.”
“That’s where Donny Potts ended up.”
“The home?”
“Yep. The home for paralyzed geezers.”
Back at the dock, Doom discovered that some vandal had chucked his bicycle into the water. He could see it down there on the bottom. Colorful little fish pecked at it. That’s another thing Doom remembered about childhood—there were always colorful fish visible in the water, doing what evolution had determined them to do, right before one’s eyes.
Doom called a cab. “Total Immersion Diving on Tequesta Key, please.”
TOTAL IMMERSION
Doom had read the text from cover to cover. It made common sense to him, except for Boyle’s Law relating to the inverse variation between the pressure and volume of a gas at a stable temperature. He hoped Rosalind wouldn’t quiz him on that, making him feel like a moron. He further hoped she’d wear the same tiny spandex suit. Her thighs didn’t touch at the top.
Doom was freezing in the over-air-conditioned cab. Its driver wore a woolen sweater and down vest…Doom’s imagination traveled from Rosalind’s curling toes and flexing ankles, over her rippling, muscular calves and soft, sensitive thighs, up, up to her bulging blah, blah, blah. The Con’s Hymn. Doom struggled to turn his rampaging thoughts back to Boyle and his Law.
“Pardon me,” said the driver in the rearview mirror, “what is your stand on the dumping of plutonium wastes in the world’s oceans?”
What was this guy’s angle?…“I’m all for it,” said Doom suspiciously.
“Me too.” And that was all the driver said for the rest of the traffic-bound trip.
She was wearing a wet suit!
Thin, tight two-tone yellow-and-black neoprene gripped her wondrous body from neck to ankles. The suit was unzipped to mid-chest, and Doom tried not to obsess on the peekaboo inner edges of her breasts nestling hauntingly beneath the rubber. Doom tried not to look. His knees began to twitter.
“I have a practice pool out back,” she said, leading him through the workroom, past racks of tanks, disassembled regulators, and a compressor. Even now, far to the north, Longfellow cons were calling up fantasies similar to Rosalind Rock’s rubber-sheathed bottom leading them to a limpid pool in a sultry climate with rustling palm fronds. “You’ll need a suit,” she said without turning to him. “Pool’s a little chilly.”
Did Boyle make mention of rubber pressure on a beautiful butt when the temperature is highly unstable after a deuce in the slammer?
She had seen nervous first-time students before, but this guy was a wreck. He could barely walk for wobbly knees. She shifted through a rack of wet suits until she found a reasonable fit and held it up to Doom’s body. He was glad he had been in the pen and gotten in shape. “You can change in there.”
Doom wondered whether a gentleman wore his bathing costume beneath his wet suit. Rosalind, it appeared, wore nothing beneath hers, so Doom decided not to. He slithered in naked, and the constriction felt good. Carefully, he zipped it up the front.
The practice pool was surrounded for privacy by a wooden slat fence and overhung by banyan trees. Fifteen feet square and equally deep, it had a broad step at the shallow end, and that’s where Rosalind stood, water lapping the mystical top of her suit. Pieces of equipment—masks, fins, regulators with stout black hoses, buoyancy compensators, scuba tanks, gauges, and arcana Doom couldn’t identify. Her practiced fingers mated a two-stage regulator to an aluminum eighty and screwed it tight, then slowly opened the valve. Highly compressed air hissed through the first stage, causing the hoses to pulse and lift.
Rosalind tested the equipment by taking two deep breaths. “Did you read the first three chapters?”
“Yes. I read the whole book.”
“Really? Did you understand it?”
“I’m a tad hazy on Boyle’s Law.”
“That’s okay, it’s the concept that counts.” Pedagogically, Rosalind had these lessons down cold, so she studied Doom’s gray eyes as she spoke. She explained that unlike in other sports, the diver is wholly dependent on mechanical devices for life support—breathing, in other words. That’s why, in order to ensure safety, they had to talk first about danger. She stressed that danger from sea life, overblown by Jaws-like exploitation, was minimal to nonexistent. Pressure, however, was a clear and present danger.
From the text, Doom had grasped the general concept. Seawater, all water, has weight. Even air has weight. At sea level, organisms experience a pressure—weight—of 14.7 pounds per square inch, or one “atmosphere.” Each 33 feet of descent in seawater adds another atmosphere to the total, or absolute, pressure. Thus, at 100 feet the diver experiences absolute pressure three times that at sea level. “Okay, so what?” she asked. “Why does the diver need to think about pressure?”
“Because pressure causes physiological changes,” Doom answered. Look at her eyes, clear, alert, flashing, and look at her overlapped front teeth. A woman like this was bound to be married or otherwise unavailable to an ex-con with limited prospects.
There are two types of pressure effects to be considered—those that occur on the descent when pressure increases and the far more serious ones that occur on the ascent when pressure decreases. Doom and Rosalind discussed them both, tog
ether. She could see his brain functioning, a rare thing in men in her experience since Claudius died of the effect of decreased pressure on the ascent. She thought of Claudius while Doom recited the cause and prevention of squeezes on descent; pneumothorax, the bends, and air embolisms on the ascent.
She remembered Claudius talking about these things, the strength and assurance in his body as he stood before the class. The depth of his sadness, not then apparent to her, a nervous student, made him even more compelling when she experienced it later. They had had only five years together before, barely forty, the sadness overcame him. She still felt guilty that she couldn’t save him somehow.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes, fine,” she said.
“Should I come back another time?”
“No, please, I’m fine. Tell me about the bends.”
“It’s caused by inert gases such as nitrogen—air is seventy-eight percent nitrogen—which go into solution in the bloodstream under pressure at depth. When you ascend and the pressure lessens, the dissolved gases try to get back out through the blood and the lungs. If the pressure lessens too quickly, the unloading process falls behind and the swelling bubbles obstruct blood flow. But the nice thing about the bends seems to be that partial gases go into solution in the bloodstream at a predictable rate for a given depth, so the bends is entirely avoidable by not going too deep or staying too long.”
“You’ve never done this before?”
“I just read the book.”
“Did you write Splendor?”
Doom’s heart sank…“Guilty.”
“I saw you on the news in handcuffs. I loved that book.”
“You did?”
“Yes. Naturally, I felt like a fool.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Did you go to jail?”
“Minimum security.”
“I never understood the point of writing a terrific book and then putting Eleanor Roosevelt’s name to it. That seems absurd.”
“I fell in with a pretty absurd crowd.”
“Are you going straight?”
“Yes. Are you married?”
“No. I was, but my husband died.” She decided not to mention at this time that he died scuba diving.
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