The Deep

Shafts of sunlight streaked through the blue, dappling the sand and coral. The water was pellucid; Sanders guessed he could see for more than a hundred feet.

Treading water a few feet below the surface, he turned slowly around, searching the crepuscular limits of his vision for any potential danger. A pair of jacks darted in and out of the rocks. He looked down and saw Gail on the bottom, digging in the sand with her fingers. A small grouper hovered beside her, waiting for any morsels-worms or tiny crustaceans-that might float toward him in the cloud of sand stirred up by her digging. Sanders kicked slowly downward, swallowing to clear his ears as the pressure increased.

When he reached bottom, he saw that they had landed in a kind of amphitheater, a bowl on three sides of which coral and rock rose steeply toward the surface. The fourth, the seaward side, was open.

There the boat lay placidly on the surface, the anchor line angling down from way forward of Sanders to a spot in the rocks behind him. The only sounds he heard were the soft whistle of his inhalation and the bubbly rattle as he exhaled.

He looked around, trying to discern shapes in the distance where transparent blue dwindled into dim mist. As always when he had not dived for several months, he felt a tingle of excitement, a mild but thrilling blend of agoraphobia and claustrophobia: he was alone and exposed on a wide plain of sand, certain that he could be seen by creatures he could not see; yet he was encased, too, by thousands of tons of water whose gentle but insistent pressure he could feel on every inch of his body.

He rose off the bottom and swam to his right, to the end of the line of rocks. Creeping along the rocks, he looked for anything that might signal the presence of a wreck: metal or glass or wood. He swam around the whole bowl and found nothing. Moving to the center of the bowl, toward Gail, he tapped her on the shoulder. When she looked up, he spread his hands and raised his eyebrows, as if to say: Where do you think it is? She shrugged and held up a piece of glass, the bottom of a bottle. He waved a hand contemptuously: Forget it, worthless. He motioned for her to follow.

Together they swam to the left. At the edge of the bowl, the rocks and coral continued in a fairly straight line. A school of bright blue-and-yellow surgeonfish fluttered by. A streak of sunlight danced over a piece of mustard-colored coral, its surface smooth, inviting touch. Sanders pointed to it and shook his index ringer, warning her away. Then he pantomimed the sensation of being burned. Gail nodded: fire coral, whose mucous skin caused terrible pain.

They kicked their way along the reef, followed by the grouper, which evidently still harbored a primitive hope that something edible would result from their visit.

Sanders felt a tug at his ankle. He looked back at Gail. Her eyes were wide, and she was breathing much faster than normal. She pointed to the left.

Sanders followed her hand and saw, hanging motionless, staring at them with a white-rimmed black eye, an enormous barracuda. Its body was as sleek and shiny as a blade, its prognathous lower jaw ajar, showing a row of ragged, needle teeth.

Sanders took Gail’s left hand, turned her diamond ring so the stone faced her palm, and balled her hand into a fist. For emphasis, he held up his own clenched fist. Gail nodded, tapped herself on the chest, and pointed upward. Sanders shook his head: No. Gail insisted, frowning at him.

I’m going up, she was saying; you stay here if you want.

She kicked hard for the surface. Sanders blew an annoyed breath and followed.

“You want to quit?” he said as they boarded the boat.

“No. I want to rest for a minute. Barracudas give me the creeps.”

“He was just passing by. But you should have left your ring in the boat. Flashing that stone around is asking for trouble.”

“Why?”

“They’ll mistake it for prey. The first time I ever dove on a reef, I had a brass buckle on my bathing suit. The instructor told me to cut it off. I said the hell with it; I wasn’t about to ruin a fifteen-dollar bathing suit. So the guy took a knife and tied it to the end of a stick and set it in the sand, blade up. We were five or six feet away from the knife, and the instructor kept wiggling the stick, which made the blade flash in the sunlight.

He only had to wiggle it four or five times before a big barracuda came by and stared at the knife. The instructor wiggled it again, and bango! Faster’n you could see, that fish hit the knife. He hit it again and again, cut his mouth to ribbons, but every damn time the blade moved he’d hit it again. And every time he hit it I imagined he was hitting my belt buckle, or right nearby. I never wore that suit again, except in a pool.”

Gail removed her rings and tucked them in a cubbyhole in the steering console.

“One more thing,” Sanders said. “When there are just the two of us diving, one of us has to be the leader of the pack.”