Demon Box

“I can show you exactly,” Percy promised and scooted up the ladder to the top of the pumphouse. “I’ll dive down and locate it. Then I’ll blow a bunch of bubbles so you can bring it up.”

“When you locate it why don’t you bring it up?”

“Because it’s too big for a kid, Uncle Dev. It’s way too big for anybody but a man.”

He pulled his goggles over his eyes and grinned at me like some kind of mischievous kelpie. He sucked in a deep breath and jumped out into the air, hollering “Yaaahoo” all the way to the water. His splash shattered the glint and for a moment we saw him froglegging down. Then the surface closed over him. Quiston came and stood beside me. I finished pulling off my boots and Levi’s and tossed them inside the pumphouse. I shaded my eyes against the bounce of the sun and stared hard at the water. There wasn’t so much as a freckled flicker.

After nearly a minute Percy came spewing up through the surface. He paddled to the shore where I could give him a hand out.

“Didn’t find him,” he panted, his hands on his knees. Finally he looked up. “But I will!”

He clambered back up the ladder and dived right back in. No yell. Again the water snatched him from our sight. Quiston reached up to slip his hand into mine.

“Percy said it had teeth like a shark and a hide like a rhinoceros,” Quiston recalled. “But he’s probably just fooling.”

“Percy’s never had a reputation for reliability.”

We squinted at the water for his signal. Nothing but the chromium undulation. Quiston squeezed my hand. At length Percy spurted to the surface again.

“Must be deeper… than I thought,” he puffed, crawling ashore.

“It’s a deep pond, Percy.”

“I knew you were fooling,” Quiston claimed, relieved.

Percy flushed red and thrust a fist under Quiston’s nose.

“Listen you, you see this? Mess with the Perce, go home in a hearse!”

“Take it easy, Perce. Forget it. Why don’t you kids go down to the shallow end hunt some tadpoles?”

“Yeah, that’s it!” Quiston had never been greatly fond of this dark water by the pumphouse anyway, even without monsters. “Tadpoles in the cattails!”

“I’m not after tadpoles.” Percy said and fumed back up the ladder. He snatched off his goggles and flung them away as though they had been the trouble. He drew a great breath and dived.

The water pitched, oscillated, slowed, and stilled. I began to worry. I climbed up the ladder, hoping to decrease the angle. Impervious as rolled steel. Quiston called up at me: “Dad… ?” I watched the water. Percy didn’t come up. I was just about to dive in after him when I saw his face part the surface.

He lay back treading water for a long while before he paddled for shore.

“Never mind, Percy,” Quiston called. “I believe you. We believe you, don’t we, Dad?”

“Sure. It could have been anything—a sunken branch, that deck chair Caleb threw in last fall..

Percy refused Quiston’s offered hand and pulled himself up the muddy bank to the grass. “It wasn’t any branch. Wasn’t any chair. Maybe it wasn’t any monster but it wasn’t any goddamn furniture either so fuck you!”

He wrapped his arms around his knees and shivered. Quiston looked up at me on the pumphouse roof.

“Okay, okay, I’ll take a look,” I said and both boys cheered.

I removed my watch. I tossed it to Quiston and stepped to the high edge of the pumphouse roof. I hooked my toes over the tar-papered plywood and started breathing. I could feel my blood gorging with oxygen. Old skindiver trick the kid didn’t know. Also he’d been jumping too far out, hitting too flat. I would go straighter down … breathe three more, crouch low, spring as high as possible, and jackknife.

But in the middle of the leap I changed my dive.

Now I’m no diver. My only period near a diving board was the year we spent in Boyes Hot Springs while my father was stationed at Mare Island. Buddy and I were about Quiston and Percy’s ages. A retired bosun friend of my dad’s devoted many after-school afternoons teaching us to go off the high board. Buddy learned to do a respectable one-and-a-half. The best I could accomplish was a backward cutaway swan, where you spring up, throw your feet forward and lie backward in the air, coming past the board close with your belly. It looks more dangerous than it is. All you have to do is get far out enough.

And when I took off from the pumphouse I knew I was getting plenty far out. I was so pumped by the distance and height my wonder muscles had achieved that I couldn’t help but think the future is now, and I went into my cutaway.