Spirits of the Pirate House (3 page)

“All right, I’ll work on my parents. But,
guys, one thing I’m going to have to hold firm on—there’s NO way
I’m scuba diving. It’s hard enough for me to stay on the surface
with a snorkel.”

“Fair enough,” said T.J. “Talk to your folks
and get back to me ASAP so I can call Weinstein and tell him it’s a
go. Then Bortnicker and I can book some SCUBA classes. You’re
sure
you’re not into diving? The Adventure Channel’s picking
up the tab.”

“I’m dead sure, Cuz. When I was little I
almost drowned in a lake, and ever since, I’ve been terrified of
being underwater. I’ll swim in a pool and occasionally salt water
if it’s crystal clear, but that’s where I draw the line.”

Bortnicker, trying to lighten the mood, broke
in. “What was the original name of
Help!
”

“The song or the movie?”

“The movie.”

“Eight Arms to Hold You
.”

“Right again.” He frowned, then produced a
devilish grin. Affecting his best Beatle voice, he said, “You know,
luv, we’ve never been told which one of us Liverpool lads you
fancied as your fave. And who might that be?”

T.J., a dead-ringer for the young Paul
McCartney, smirked at his friend’s obviously leading question.

“That’s a no-brainer,” she said airily. “It’s
gotta be Ringo.”

“Ringo
!” the boys cried in unison.

“Oh, definitely. Without his backbeat they
were
nothing
. Besides, I always go for the underdog.” She
chuckled. “Gotta go, boys. Dad’s cranking up the snow blower and
he’s gonna need help with the driveway.”

“Keep thinking of the swaying palm
trees.”

“I will. Talk to you soon, guys.”

As T.J. hung up the phone, Bortnicker started
rummaging around in the pantry for the ingredients to create his
masterpiece snack, spiced beef nachos. He’d really gotten into the
cooking thing after whipping up a series of gourmet-quality
breakfasts with LouAnne’s mom the previous summer in Gettysburg,
and though he never seemed to gain a pound on his spindly frame,
both of the Jackson men looked forward to his impromptu feasts.
Removing a can of refried beans from the top shelf he asked, “So
you think this ghost thing’s gonna happen?”

“I’d say right now it’s 50-50. But I’ve got
an ace up my sleeve. I went online and checked the Bermuda tourist
calendar of events, and the second week of June there’s a 5k road
race for teens. I’ll bet she’ll want to enter, especially if I say
I’m entering too.”

“Yeah,” said Bortnicker with a smile. “I
remember you two got pretty intense last summer on those morning
runs through the battlefield. So you’re figuring she’ll want a
little friendly family competition?”

“You got it. If chasing pirate ghosts doesn’t
get her psyched, kicking my butt in a race will!”

Chapter Three

“
I think I’m going to
be sick,” moaned T.J. as the dive boat rose and fell in the
blue-gray swells of Long Island Sound.

“Yeah,” said Bortnicker, wiping his mouth
after he’d heaved up his lunch over the side, “you’ve got an
interesting shade of green going there.”

The boys were part of a group of six heading
to the mouth of Bridgeport Harbor to take their final SCUBA junior
certification test. This cold mid-May Sunday was the culmination of
a comprehensive training course that had begun with four long
classroom sessions, followed by a written exam which both boys had
passed with flying colors.

The local dive shop owner, Capt. Kenny Ali, a
burly, bearded character who hailed from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn,
had left no stone unturned or ego unbruised in imparting his vast
knowledge of diving accumulated over the past 30 years. Again and
again as the group, comprised mostly of fit men and women between
the ages of 25-40, were drilled in the complexities of water
pressure and breathable gas mixes, Capt. Kenny hammered home the
fact that miscalculations in equipment preparations, bottom times,
and ascension speed could lead to dire consequences. “You don’t get
second chances like topside,” was his mantra.

The boys looked forward to their weekly
lessons at Capt. Kenny’s Dive Shop, a white cinderblock bunker
plopped in the middle of a busy Bridgeport thoroughfare. The place
had a certain ambience that made you just want to strap on some
tanks and jump in. Up front was a showroom with equipment, both new
and used, for sale—everything from dive watches to knives to
wetsuits, which the boys probably wouldn’t be needing in Bermuda’s
warm June waters. Kenny’s prices were fair, as far as the teens
could determine. He could have charged a lot more, as his customers
were primarily from wealthy nearby towns like Westport and New
Canaan, but the captain’s main goal, it seemed, was to not
discourage newbies to the hobby with steep prices or unnecessary
equipment that would make an already expensive pastime even more
so.

But what really attracted them, and what
caused them to hang around way after their lessons, were the
thousands of shipwreck artifacts on display from Kenny’s diving
career, arranged on shelves and in glass museum cases. Every piece,
it seemed, had a story, and the Captain reveled in each telling.
The somewhat gloomy lighting and strong smell of saltwater that
permeated the low-ceilinged rooms only added to the atmosphere as
he spun yarns of dangerous dives to merchant ships, German U-Boats,
and his personal favorite, the
Andrea Doria
, which lay about
50 miles off the coast of Nantucket in icy North Atlantic waters.
He’d get this kind of faraway look and effect a reverential tone in
describing his harrowing descent and penetration of the palatial
Italian ocean liner which had sunk in 1957 when struck by a Swedish
ship on a foggy night, causing the deaths of some 46 passengers and
crew.

“See, the
Doria
lies in over 200 feet
of water,” he’d explained, fondling a tea cup snatched from the
First Class section of the ship. “When I was ready to finally
attempt a dive on her, I hooked on wit’ a charter boat out of New
Jersey with some of my most experienced diver pals. We’d all been
diving for a while, but the
Andrea Doria
is somethin’ you
got to work up to. Part of it is the depth, which at the deepest is
like 250 feet. But also, once you get inside it’s a freakin’ mess.
First of all, the ship lays on its side, so everything from engine
parts to machinery to furniture is trown all over the place. Then
you got miles of wires and cables reaching out for you like snakes.
Get snagged on that stuff and you’re a goner.”

“How come?” asked Bortnicker. “Don’t you have
a dive buddy with you?”

“Nah,” said Kenny. “What you guys are
learnin’ is basic recreational diving, which seldom exceeds 100
feet. So the buddy system is a must. But in deep sea wreck diving,
you’re squeezin’ through openings that are only big enough for one
guy. And even if there was somebody wit’ you, what happens is the
guy in trouble could panic and rip off the other guy’s regulator if
he knows he’s low on air. So now you got
two
guys in
trouble.

“Another problem is, at that depth, as you
two are learnin’ in your dive chart study, you can’t just shoot to
the surface after 20 minutes of bottom time at 200 feet. You have
to decompress by climbing the boat’s anchor line in stages,
stopping off at certain levels and hangin’, so your system
equalizes. If you come up too fast you suffer ‘the bends’, which is
the buildup of gas bubbles in your system. Remember the comparison
I gave you in class?”

“The seltzer bottle thing?” said T.J.

“Yeah, that’s the one. Like I said, think of
what happens if you quickly open a seltzer bottle. You can get a
violent overflow of bubbles. Well, underwater that takes the form
of an embolism in your bloodstream, which can cause blindness, a
stroke, or even death.

“But if you twist the cap slowly, letting the
air out a little at a time to ease the pressure, you’re all
right—no spill. That’s what decompression stops are for, to let
your body equalize. At the depth of 200 feet, you’d have to do
roughly an hour of decompression on your way up; with each measured
stop, the time you hang there increases, from five minutes to 25 or
so.

“What’s happened is, some guys get
disoriented down there; they panic, lose their sense of reason, and
figure they don’t have enough air left to decompress. So, up they
go, like a freakin’ rocket, and only bad things can happen from
then on.

“What’s good about youse guys is that with
your basic certification, you’ll be good to go in shallow water, so
a lot of this won’t apply. But you gotta learn it, anyway. So, what
is it this TV show’s gonna have you do?”

“Well,” said T.J., “as near as I can figure
it, there was this pirate named William Tarver in the 1700s who
used Bermuda as a safe harbor between trips to Jamaica and England.
He later established an estate on the island that’s said to be
haunted, which is why we’re going there. But, a year or so ago a
guy with a dive shop business like yours found a wreck, mostly by
accident, way out past the reefs of the South Shore—”

“And they think it’s this pirate’s?”

“Exactly,” said Bortnicker. “According to
records they uncovered in the Bermuda Maritime History archives,
the ship suddenly went missing in an area near where the dive shop
captain found the remnants of a wreck. So it could be the one.”

“Was it sunk by another ship, scuttled on
purpose, or lost in a storm?”

“They don’t know,” said T.J. “Kinda
mysterious.”

“Well,” said Capt. Kenny, “not for nothing,
but what light are you two greenhorns supposed to shed on
this?”

“I don’t think they want us to do any
scientific stuff at all,” said T.J. “The show’s mostly about the
pirate’s estate house. I think they just want us to cruise by the
wreck to add to the show.
Gonzo Ghost Chasers
does that all
the time for like the first ten minutes of an episode. They call it
‘local color’.”

“Humpf,” grunted Capt. Kenny. “I still think
they’re asking you to do too much. Just make sure you learn as much
from me as you can for as long as we’re here.”

As T.J. and Bortnicker came to realize, there
was so much that could go wrong on a dive: a leaky face mask, a
tear in your buoyancy vest, running out of air, slicing your air
hose on sharp coral, rip currents and sharks and barracuda and
moray eels ... but oh, the rewards! Capt. Kenny’s thrilling diving
stories had prompted the teens into watching reruns of shows like
Deep Sea Detectives
, which featured wreck dives hundreds of
feet down. Bortnicker also haunted the Fairfield Public Library,
bringing home armfuls of National Geographic and History Channel
specials with a diving (preferably also pirate) theme which they
hungrily devoured during the dreary days of March and April, when
it seemed to rain as much as it had snowed in January and
February.

Somehow, despite their dive fever, they had
still managed to keep their grades up, and both had been chosen for
the JV baseball team, T.J. as a centerfielder and Bortnicker as a
statistician. But their upcoming adventure always loomed in the
background.

After the written test had come some intense
water training at a local college’s Olympic-sized pool. To even
qualify for that the boys had to swim the length of the pool six
times without stopping, a gargantuan task for Bortnicker, whose
hobbies of model railroading and video games hardly left him in the
best of shape. Fortunately, unlike a couple of their older
classmates, neither boy had panicked on their first dives to the
bottom of the deep end of the pool. In fact, Capt. Kenny, who was
always cognizant that the teens were in training for an Adventure
Channel appearance, took special interest in technique and safety
at every step.

“Don’t want you guys drownin’ or somethin’
while America watches in horror,” he cracked. Of course, he had
showered the boys with every piece of equipment to which a
Capt.
Kenny’s Dive Shop, Bridgeport
logo could be affixed. “A little
publicity couldn’t hoit,” he reassured.

So here they were, riding the swells and
anxiously awaiting their moment of truth at the bottom of the
harbor.

The test would be comprised of three basic
tasks, all performed with their Divemaster, Capt. Kenny:

First, each student had to make his way to
the bottom using a guide rope from the boat—roughly 25 feet—and
await the Divemaster.

Upon his arrival, the trainee would have to
remove his mask completely, then replace it and clear it; trade
mouthpieces with the Divemaster to share their air tanks; and use a
wristwatch/compass to orient himself and swim along the bottom to
and back from a buoy anchor some 50 feet away.

After they’d anchored the boat, Capt. Kenny
told the trainees to suit up and do a perfunctory equipment check.
It was at this point that a rather attractive Asian woman, who had
been the ace of the classroom sessions, declared that she couldn’t
possibly go through with the final part. The Captain, standing with
legs spread for balance as the boat rocked, merely shrugged his
blocky shoulders and said, “Your choice, ma’am. You’re paid up and
I shure don’t wanna make you do somethin’ you don’t wanna do. Don’t
want you drownin’ the both of us down there.”

Slowly, the boys and their classmates pulled
on their funky smelling rubber wetsuits and checked the pressure in
their air tanks. T.J. tested his mouthpiece, which at first had
made him gag, then spat into his facemask, spread the saliva around
with his fingers, and gave it a rinse over the side. He hoped the
gasoline in the water surrounding the dive boat wouldn’t seep into
his breathing equipment below, because the churning ocean had
brought him to the edge of nausea and left him dangling.