Heat

by Michael Cadnum

  “You don’t have to do this,” Miss P said, leaning close to me. “You can go in and take a rest.”

  I waved her away.

  “You look rotten,” said Denise. I felt like telling her that if I had done so badly on my difficulty-zero dives I would keep my mouth shut. Denise and I liked to run or swim laps together, and she laughed at the same books I do, where the author proves space aliens built the Great Pyramids and invented Oreos. Sometimes I wished she had chronic laryngitis.

  I had to go into the locker room and lie down on a bench. Even in there I could hear the endless babble, a cavern of faceless voices beyond the metal doors.

  Dad had called just before I left to catch the bus, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I hadn’t gotten medical clearance. I had never even mentioned my injury. I conned myself into half believing I didn’t want to cause him any worry. I knew he was proud of me for earning a write-up in the Chronicle, “Prep Platform Promise,” although they had not run the picture the paper had spent an hour getting from various angles, me in midair. Dad wished me luck, and then, putting on his confidential voice, he said, “You were real good with Cindy.”

  I had been sitting on my bed, one shoe off, one shoe on, glad to hear his voice at last, and yet I couldn’t help bridling a little at his phrasing. “Of course I was good,” I said, serving the word back to him.

  “We’ll take the boat out this weekend,” he said.

  Cindy had told me, in complete seriousness, that it was all right to have a painted still life with fruit on a plate in the dining room. She had read it in a magazine. I listened for some sign in Dad’s voice of what he might see in Cindy, wondering at the power sex has over people. And Cindy wasn’t even terribly pretty—she was all right, in a tepid, Bo-Peep way but didn’t have the kind of looks Mom has when she really tries.

  “We’ll go out and see if any whales are migrating,” he was saying.

  Dad has no idea when whales migrate, what they eat, or whether or not they poop in the water. But I was grateful for the effort he was making. “I bet the boat has barnacles all over it,” I said, so pleased at the idea of going out on the bay that I couldn’t express it.

  A company called Marine Core power-vacuumed Queen Athena’s hull, and Dad himself called me from the motor yacht sometimes, using the boat as a weekend office. I don’t think he took it out more than three times a year, but it was his pride. His only hobby was caring for the Queen, rubbing tung oil on the teak finishing, experimenting with brass polish and chemicals that killed mildew.

  Lying on a locker room bench is not reassuring. The benches are slatted wood and narrow, and it is easy to have the illusion that you are ten thousand feet up on a plank, one move and you plummet. I kept telling one of the dentist-wife moms that I was all right, every time she bustled in to check.

  I had to pull the earphones off my head. I was listening to one of Miss P’s favorites, a tape on concentrating your mind. Waves crash, and wind blows through grasses, and it sounds a lot like the recordings Rowan and his parents make, except that a man’s voice tells you to imagine things. I would hear a discordant female voice saying my name, and I would have to stir myself from My Own Private Landscape and tell a woman who probably couldn’t even swim that I was down-stressing.

  “You sure?” she would say each time, lipstick and frosted hair.

  I wasn’t light-headed, and I wasn’t seeing double. I wanted to turn the volume all the way up, high enough to damage my ears, so I wouldn’t have to hear the endless, lapping sounds of the dives. And my own nagging inner voice: If I couldn’t even stand to watch, what was going to happen when Dr. Breen said I was cleared to dive?

  After the day’s competition, we ate at a Chinese restaurant near the state capitol, Denise and I sharing a baked fish that arrived looking like a dragon, mouth agape, roasted eyeballs staring. Denise asked the waiter to take off the head so she wouldn’t have to look at it. Her dad calls her “Princess,” and had Bausch & Lomb custom design prescription goggles so she could have 20/20 vision underwater.

  Miss P said it was okay to open the fortune cookies, and if the fortune was bad it would come true only if we ate some of the cookie. She laughed, but she looked tired, more weary than a coach should, with one day of elimination over and plenty of scoring to come.

  I hunted around among the cracked-open cookies. The fortunes were on little paper tabs that scatter and soak up spilled tea. There were two kinds of fortunes: You are outgoing and have many friends, the blazing compliment. You will make a fortune and travel widely, the golden lie.

  If I worked in a cookie factory I would write fortunes that would help improve the world. Three incredibly delightful things will happen to you if you recycle aluminum for a year. I opened a new cookie, read the little white slip, and handed it to Miss P across the table. It told her she won respect wherever she went.

  She read it and smiled thank you.

  “You were okay,” I told Denise that night, kicking my feet to loosen the strait-jacket covers. Okay can mean a lot of different things. The hamburgers are okay can mean: Take these away, no one can eat them.

  “I was shit,” she said. She was watching television, aiming the remote but not using it.

  We were in the Holiday Inn, right beside the Interstate 80 Alternate. You could walk under the freeway and visit Old Town, shops where they sold raspberry ropes and licorice chews, and the shop clerks wore derby hats. Tourists licked pistachio nut and pumpkin sherbet ice cream cones, but we were forbidden what Miss P called glop, so after a quick peek at the postcard racks we had scurried back to the inn, safe and snug by curfew.

  “It just wasn’t your best day,” I conceded gently.

  Denise snapped off the television and gave me a steady look. The whites of her eyes were bloodshot. The goggles make her look like a frog; she leaves them at home. She thinks the bathing cap she wears makes her look like a classic diver from the fifties. “Be honest with me, Bonnie,” she said.

  My voice is all springtime and daisies compared with Denise’s gangster contralto. I didn’t really want to be frank with her—she wasn’t as calm as she looked. “Okay.”

  “I’ve never had a worse day, right?”

  Sometimes you just don’t want to cause that little extra bit of pain.

  “I was that bad,” she said. So bad you can’t even express it.

  But Denise’s dives hadn’t been shockingly terrible—just a matter of awkward timing. And no poise—she had lost her calm, bunching her jaw, diving like someone smashing through a cinderblock wall. “I’ve seen a lot worse,” I said.

  “You’re telling me everything I need to know,” she said.

  “I didn’t say a single negative.”

  “Thank you, Bonnie,” she said, running her fingers through her dark hair.

  “I didn’t say anything!”

  I wished Miss P had gotten the kind of fortune she deserved: Good news will arrive from an unexpected quarter.

  CHAPTER TEN

  By the time I reached berth 101 I could see that the day wasn’t going to go the way I had pictured it.

  Cindy was leaning against the taffrail, looking at the boats and bare masts all around us through binoculars. Perhaps I had expected a quiet, father/daughter day in the sun, Cindy demurely in the background. I must have been a huge, weird image through the Leitz binoculars, legging my way down the gangway, because she gave a little start and said, “Golly!”

  But it was the presence of Jack Stoughton that made me take a moment before I stepped down into the Queen, not wanting to see Jack or have him see me. Not that we ever say any more than hi to each other. Jack Stoughton defends people Denise knows, money launderers and basketball players three years behind in their child support payments. He’s good at it, always driving a new Jaguar or a bright red two-seater of a make no one else ever heard of. Jack had gone to school with Dad—they played tennis together on the asphalt courts in Strawberry Canyon.

  Dad looked out fr
om the cabin door just to one side of the helm, and he gave me one of his waves, one hand up, like someone far away. He looked wonderful, tanned, a little white mark on his nose from wearing sunglasses. He was motioning Jack into the cabin, where a miniature galley and a miniature bathroom and a bedroom/living room were nestled into the hull, neat and homey.

  “Bonnie,” Jack boomed, not dressed for boating, which gave me a little hope. He wore a rust-brown suit, matching his red hair and his red eyebrows. He cocked his head and gave me a smile he should have practiced in front of a mirror, showing where some bridgework on the left side of his upper jaw was missing. Then Jack, too, vanished into the cabin, reaching back to pull the door shut.

  “Jack’s on the clock,” said Cindy, looking around at pointless things with the binoculars Dad kept stowed along with the bird book and the spare batteries. She meant: Dad would be billed for this visit, down to the minute. One of Dad’s habitual gestures is a glance at his sport watch, which he wears with the watch face on the pulse of his wrist. I’ve watched him making notes in a red leather book when he gets done with one phone call and starts another, getting up to shut the den door, protecting client privilege.

  “Dad’s throwing him some business,” I said, not really interested, just accepting the fact that it would be a while.

  Cindy shrugged, but she kept peering at distant cars and people swabbing decks or flaking out rope in tidy Flemish loops.

  “You wouldn’t want to have a boat like that,” she said, indicating a dazzling white sailing yacht purling out toward the bay under temporary mechanical power, its crew of four leaning against the port rail, flexing their shoulders, getting ready for some white-canvas sailing.

  I wanted to respond that I sure would, but Cindy looked worn today, little wrinkles under her eyes, and I pawed through my carryall for some sunblock.

  She applied the stuff with two fingers, squinting and gaping like someone smearing on night cream. “It would be hard to park a big yacht like that,” she was saying.

  I agreed that it might take practice.

  “What happened here?” she said, pointing above her own ear.

  I didn’t say anything. I touched the bare place on my head, the fine little stitches. Fuzz was already filling in the naked skin.

  “Better put some goop on it,” she said.

  I appreciated her good sense, but didn’t want the coconut oil in my hair. Still, I accepted her attentions, her gentle dab, dab, and when the two men emerged you could see Jack approving, women involved in petty activities, grooming each other.

  But this wasn’t the way I wanted to introduce the subject of my injury, so I flung the scarf over my head for a moment, peasant fashion.

  “Later,” Dad called to Jack, and big as our boat is, she lifted and fell when Jack disembarked and hurried up the gangway, folding papers into an interior pocket of his jacket.

  “Champion!” said Dad, and he gave me a hug. I was a little embarrassed. Champion is one of his pet names for me, and here was Cindy looking on. But he was also letting me know that his feelings for me were the same as ever, and he was letting Cindy in on this, too. He didn’t comment on the blue-and-white scarf knotted under my chin.

  As we rumbled past the Alameda Coast Guard station, Cindy wanted to know why the navy painted its ships red and white. I told her they were rescue cutters, and you’d be glad to see them if you were clinging to a floating mast off the Farrallons. Maybe I misrepresented my grasp of sea lore a little, explaining to her that there were two kinds of cutters, one a variety of sailboat, not at all like one of these powerful small ships. I can read a compass, and a depth chart is no mystery, but I have trouble calling a toilet “the head.”

  “I took swimming lessons,” she asserted.

  “You didn’t!” said Dad, steady at the helm, not looking at either of us.

  “The Australian crawl,” said Cindy. She headed back across the boat, and focused the binoculars on another sight too close to be worth looking at through eight by twenty-four glasses, a gray ship taking on a stream of shiny metal, scrap entering her cargo hold with a grinding roar like a garbage disposal. Even with the light wind drifting from the west you could smell the processed metal, a sour stink.

  “Australian crawl,” said Dad, with a wink at me. No one calls it that anymore. “Bonnie’ll rescue you.”

  “In Ames,” she said. “Fulfilling the PE requirement. I was the best in the class.”

  She said this in a pertly serious way, and Dad was quick to say that he had no doubt she was the best in every category.

  “My Great-Uncle Carl was nearly killed by a torpedo,” she said.

  “What did you do with that pill?” Dad asked his bride as we powered north toward the Bay Bridge, the water calm, the air beginning to freshen. This was the way an experienced lawyer asks questions—not Did you swallow the medicine? or Did you lose the tablet?—never leading the witness.

  “I took it,” said Cindy sounding resigned, or embarrassed.

  “You’re going to need it,” said Dad.

  By the time the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge fell over us Cindy was leaning back on a cushion in the cabin, swearing that the seasickness pill would kick in any minute.

  I got her a plastic pan from the galley, the kind a boat carries for really no other purpose. I sat with her. “He was on a troop ship going to Europe, and they had the wolf packs,” she said. “The submarines?” She said this with a questioning tone, as though offering an answer she thought might be wrong.

  I couldn’t follow her thread of conversation for a moment. I must have murmured something, because she added, “He heard the torpedo hit with a clang. But it didn’t go off.”

  When I got a wet hand towel from the bathroom—the head—she said that I was wasting my time, she would die soon. She said it as a joke, but her lips were gray.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I had to grab a rail and hang on. The wind was stiffening, the radio antenna lashing back and forth. I couldn’t help feeling a stab of compassion for Cindy, below deck, half out of her bunk.

  Dad shook his head happily and shouted something about not being able to get the maximum out of the Queen today. Or maybe he was yelling merrily that he was going to plunge us all deep into the Pacific. Dad had always driven the forty-eight-foot Super Sport toward its limit, thirty knots when a swell wasn’t running. The boat tore through the moderate seas, and a large ship, a coursing building, loomed down on us.

  I was aware of how much I had been looking forward to conversation, chitchat, how snorkeling had been. I had been wondering if Dad might want a kitten in a couple of months—maybe two kittens. He often took in strays, although he had terrible luck with them, always having to drive them to the vet. Myrna’s kittens still looked like dirty socks, but they were at the crawling stage, their eyes beginning to open.

  I suspected it was against some law to slash through the water in shirtsleeves, none of the passengers equipped with life vests. The tanker made a subtle adjustment, the faceless bulk steering by telepathy, and when the giant vessel was past us, Dad swung the helm to slice across the wake.

  The container ship loomed, so breathtakingly close I felt the cool damp of its shadow, but this was pure Dad, grinning as our bow wave plastered the windshield with salt water and drenched my silk scarf so it hung on me chilly and wet. Dad had ordered the Queen custom crafted from a boatbuilder in Egg Harbor, New Jersey, and in the four years since he had first eased her out of the berth he had always looked forward to pounding his way through choppy water, forgetting all about fuel efficiency.

  “How’s your tennis?” he shouted over the thrum of the engine, and it sounded like he was calling, How’s your dentist?

  Dad eased off on the throttle, gulls capering along the lacy trough in the water. Some of the gulls were gray, drab, a year or two old, and some were older, elegant and pristine in their adult uniforms. I said something about not having much time to practice.

  “I’m going to giv
e Cindy lessons,” he said. “We’ll make a threesome.”

  In his den Dad had a shelf of nothing but Wimbledon on videotape. “The two of us against your forehand smash,” I said, playing along, just to keep him in such a good mood.

  “Why not?” There were little flecks of water on his sunglasses. They would dry there, leaving brine spots, so I stooped into the galley for some paper towels. Cindy was a huddled thing, boneless, beyond the bulkhead. I gave the towel a squirt of Windex and wiped his glasses for him. I was stalling, giving myself some time to remember the last time I had picked up a tennis racket, Rowan and I not even bothering to keep score.

  “Tell me why not?” he persisted, allowing me to hook the aviator glasses over his ears.

  I lifted one shoulder, let it fall, happy but unwilling to commit. My family takes sports like a religion. I was scheduled to see Dr. Breen on Friday before lunch.

  “You’re chicken,” he said offhandedly.

  Dad used a set of old-fashioned epithets when he teased or when he stubbed his toe on one of his own briefcases. You were “chicken” if you insisted on donning a life vest, or “a heel” if you didn’t send someone a get-well card, or “a piker” if you bought the cheapest meal on the menu. I don’t know where he got these words, and no one else I have ever met used quite this vocabulary. When he stubbed his toe he said “Judas Priest,” the closest he ever came to swearing.

  But there was a trace of challenge to the sidelong glance he gave me. Dad owns tennis, possesses it entirely—he might have invented the sport personally, down to the sweet spot in the rackets and the fuzz on the balls. He has two serves. Serve One is a gunshot, blinding fast. If that attack is long or wide, Serve Two is a lob, gentle and spooky, with a magical backspin. Every time I’d seen him play Jack Stoughton, the big red-haired man ended up reaching for his wallet, another bet lost.