The Devil Went Down to Austin (31 page)

And now, God knows, I wish I'd taken her hand.

But then she looked over my shoulder—at my friend, coming out of the bushes, grinning with a blue triceratops in his hand—and she realized her mistake. She told my friend, "Come on. Come with me." She said a whole bunch of other soothing things.

Her voice was so kind, so loving, that it hurt. I wanted to go.

Her back was to me. My friend gave me one confused grin. And then they were gone together, through the gate, and the car sounds disappeared down the alley.

I don't remember the rest of the afternoon. I think I went back to playing. I must have caught hell when I was finally called for dinner, when I was found alone. I must have been punished.

But here's the strange thing.

I remember the seats of the woman's car, her lavender smell, the kindness in her voice. I can close my eyes and see trees going by, neighbourhoods of tidy houses and blooming honeysuckle fences. I can see the house she took me to, a big swing in an old oak tree, lemonade on the porch. I can close my eyes and be in that place again, a long way from the mud table and the chewed plastic dinosaurs.

There are times I can't remember which child I was.

Lopez cut the engine, let the boat drift into the swell.

Two in the afternoon, and another thunderstorm was threatening. The temperature had risen into the steamy high nineties. Boat traffic was almost nonexistent. There was nobody to admire our fortysixfoot party pontoon, which was probably just as well.

Lopez had impressed Clyde Simms into service, and Clyde had reluctantly agreed to furnish dive gear and a boat. But in passive aggressive revenge, Clyde had given us topoftheline in big, slow, and clunky, insisting that the Flagship of Fun was the only thing in working order. The twolevel pontoon normally rented for $120 an hour, he assured us. Ninety horsepower engine, benchsofa seating for fifty people. We had a barbecue grill, a rest room, a tendisc CD changer, a 150quart cooler, and a water slide that went from the top deck into the lake. I'd pushed for a mirror disco ball, but Maia Lee told me to shut up.

Lopez came out from behind the wheel.

He wore only a swimsuit. With his dark, muscular build, he looked like a Polynesian fire dancer. All he needed were some tiki torches, and I was pretty sure we could find those somewhere aboard the Flagship of Fun.

He picked up a net bag stuffed with yellow polypropylene line, dug out one end and looped it through the eyehook of a small anchor that looked like a lopsided dumbbell.

Despite the scanty clothes, Lopez somehow looked more serious and professional doing this task than he ever had in coat and tie.

Clyde stood at the wet bar at the stern. He wore a fivemillimetre suit peeled to the waist, and was loading a revolver. Lopez had been none too happy about Clyde bringing the gun, but Clyde had started quoting the Second Amendment at him, calling him a fascist, and Lopez had given up.

As for Maia, she sat on the centre couch, as far from the water as she could get. Given the options of not coming along at all, going into the water, or going out on the boat, she'd chosen the least of three evils.

So far she'd done a good job not getting sick, despite being surrounded by scuba gear.

Lopez crouched next to his regulator, checked his hand console— a topoftheline dive computer, complete with GPS locator.

He said, "We're here."

I looked across the water. We were only about fifty yards out from the marina.

Upstream I could see Jimmy's cove—his old boat dock, his dome. A quarter mile farther up, the limestone cliffs of Windy Point. Downstream was Defeat Hollow, where Ruby's boat had been moored. Then Mansfield Dam, a concrete curtain across the lake. Everything seemed so close together.

Clyde finished loading his revolver, clicked it shut.

I said, "You expecting aggressive catfish?"

"I expect you to fuck up, man. One way or the other." He looked at Lopez. "Let me go down with you."

"Thanks all the same, Mr. Simms. But if Navarre is right, I don't want you down there to see what we find. And I need an experienced person up top as safety diver."

"You don't trust me," he said.

Lopez busied himself with his gear, tested the polypropylene line.

Maia made one last pitch. "Let me call in the dive team."

"And tell them what, counsellor? Lopez is running leads from Magnum, P.I., now?

Lopez thinks corpses float upstream?" He shook his head. "No thank you. I'll check it out first myself."

He turned to me. "You've done this before, you said."

"Diving, yes. Recovery, no."

"Tell me again—when and where and how deep?"

"Recreationally, as a kid. Salt water in the Caribbean. Once as an adult in Hawaii, down to sixtyfive feet."

Lopez and Clyde exchanged looks.

"Oh good," Lopez said. "A blackwater expert. Lake Travis is the clearest lake in Texas, Navarre, which means your visibility here will be three to ten feet rather than zero.

Unless you stir up the bottom, in which case you're blind."

"Stop the scare tactics," Maia snapped. "Tres can handle it."

Lopez turned, the muscles in his neck tensing. "That's good to know, counsellor.

'Cause he and I, we're dive buddies now. If he freaks out down there and gets me killed, he's going to need a damn good defence attorney."

The boat bobbed. Lopez grabbed a Body Glove shortie, threw it to me, then another wet suit—a Farmer John style. "You'll need both," he said. "Layer them. We'll probably hit three thermocline layers on the way down. Even in June, the bottom is going to feel like an icebox."

"What's underneath us?" I asked.

Clyde and Lopez exchanged another look, but neither responded. Clyde started unlatching a med kit.

I said to Lopez, "You've been down there before, haven't you? This spot in particular."

Lopez picked up a mask. "There's about a hundred and ten feet of water under us, Navarre. We're floating on top of a pecan grove."

"The McBride farm."

Lopez spit in his mask, rubbed the glass. "It's an eerie place, Navarre. It's a fucking forest at the bottom of the lake. It's so deep, we'd bust the charts if we went down with the regular pressure gauges, the SPGs. We'll go on computer—more accurate nitrogen allowance. Even then, we've only got about ten minutes at the bottom.

Probably less."

He put the mask down, took the dumbbell anchor to the side of the boat, and dropped it over with a sploosh. The line fed out.

"What we'll do," Lopez said, "is a modified circular search. You're going to be anchorman, Navarre. All you got to do, you follow the line down, float just above the bottom. Not on the bottom. Don't touch that. It's about three feet of silt and muck, and you put so much as a fin in it—poof. We'll be in a blackout."

The line went slack.

"Snag." Lopez tugged at it, moved down the boat a few feet, then kept lowering it. "There. That should be the bottom. Looks like a hundred five feet.

We'll let the silt settle for a few minutes."

Lopez cut the top end of the rope, tied it to a yellow inflatable buoy the size of a bike tire. It had a diverdown flag fastened to the top. Lopez made the line taut and set the buoy over the side.

"I go down with you," he said. "I take a second line out from the anchor—a tender line.

I do a quick sweep of the area, as much as the trees will let me. The signals are like this. One tug from you or me means stop. Two tugs, take up the slack. Three tugs from you means come here. From me, it means let out some slack. Four tugs, pull me in slowly. Five tugs, I'm in trouble and can't get back. You get five tugs, pass that signal along to the surface by pulling hard on the main line, and Clyde comes in. He'll be fifty percent ready to dive the whole time we're down. Counsellor, you know enough to help Simms suit up?"

Maia nodded.

Lopez stared at me intently. "You got all that?"

"I think so."

"Give it back to me," he ordered. "All the signals." I did.

"Now the basic dive signals," Lopez said. "Let's make sure we're using the same ones."

I ran through the ones I remembered. I needed a little prompting, but in the end, Lopez seemed satisfied.

"We wear a minimum of gear," he told me. "It's easy to get snagged down there. You get caught, don't panic. You might get in a zerovisibility situation. You might not even be able to see the rope. In that case, you find east on your computer compass. The console is illuminated—stick it against your mask if you need to. Then you swim east.

You'll hit the shore that way no matter what, and you just follow it up. How fast do you ascend?"

"No more than thirty feet a minute," I said. "Safety stop twenty feet from the surface for at least fifteen minutes."

"All right," he said. "You know what nitrogen narcosis feels like?"

"One margarita for every thirty feet. Sort of like walking through the Texas Folklife Festival."

Lopez did not look amused. "You start feeling like you want to offer your regulator to the fish, the mud starts looking beautiful— you ascend to a higher level. Got it?"

"Got it."

He exhaled. "Now let's hope we don't need any of that. Suit up.”

Lopez walked over to Clyde, who was getting the tanks ready.

I sat next to Maia, started pulling on the legs of the shortie suit. "You okay?"

"Just get down there and get back up," she said. "Quickly."

She wouldn't meet my eyes. Her hair was tied back loosely, wisps of it trailing down in front of her ears like brown silk thread. She wore white shorts, an oversized blue Tshirt, flipflops. I could see the crescent scar on her calf that I'd traced with my finger many times, the single tiny mole on her forearm, the perfect diamond shaped corners of her eyes that had always reminded me of comet tails.

Maia caught me looking, gently pushed my face away. "I think you've got somewhere to go."

"Come on, Navarre," Lopez growled. "Get to it."

Two layers of fivemillimetre neoprene later, I understood why he was impatient.

Standing on the boat deck in the June heat, I felt like I was being microwaved in Saran Wrap. I pulled on the hood, attached the regulator to the tank, slipped a knife in one legholster and lineman's pliers in the other. I pulled on orange DayGlo gloves and wondered if they would blind the fish. Clyde hefted a steel tank for me while I got buckled into my BC.

Clyde said, "You watch it down there. You pay attention."

"Thanks."

Then he gave my straps a violent tug, made sure everything was too tight for comfort, and went back to his own equipment.

I doublechecked my gauges, reset the computer.

Clyde laid out a firstaid box, an emergency oxygen tank, and mask. I wished he'd waited until we were over the side.

"Right." In his hooded suit, all black except for blue stripes, Lopez looked like a buff, hightech sea lion. "Time to party."

"You want to use the water slide?" I asked.

"Shut up, Navarre."

Lopez checked my equipment. I checked his. There was an entry bench on the party boat, of course. Lopez looped his fin straps around his wrist. He sat on the bench, facing the deck, scooted his butt to the end, put one hand on his mask and the other on his weight belt, and did a backward somersault into the water.

Next it was my turn.

The splash imploded around me in a haze of cold, white foam. I was surprised at how fast I was sinking, then realized I hadn't inflated my BC. I groped for the button, kicked without the benefit of my fins, which still hung around my wrist. I had a moment of panic, then remembered that I could in fact breathe. I got under control, sent a burst of air into the vest, floated upward, and met Lopez on the surface.

He kept his regulator in his mouth, which spared me several scathing remarks, gave me the okay sign. I responded. We pulled on our fins.

Lopez went to the buoy, pulled the rope taut, retied it. We gave the okay signal to Clyde and Maia. I thought about the last time Maia had watched me descend, at Windy Point, going down to meet Matthew Pena.

Lopez gave me the thumbsdown sign. I reciprocated.

We held up our inflator hoses, released air, and began to sink.

We faced each other as we went down, following the yellow line. Almost fully covered in neoprene, my body felt unreal, only the area around my mouth feeling the full effect of the cold.

Bubbles trickled up my fingers. Lopez was a dark, multilimbed thing across from me, vaguely outlined in spears of light from the surface. Below, a chasm—black and green brush strokes of water, shifting.

Lopez unclipped the flashlight from his belt, tapped it. I got out mine. We switched them on and continued descending finsfirst.

About every ten feet I had to pinch my nose to equalize the pressure in my ears. Soon, the light in the world was reduced to our two yellow flashlight beams—like a cockeyed car driving through green JellO. Occasionally the ghostly form of a catfish or Guadalupe river perch would flit into our light, then turn as if scorched and vanish.

We hit a thermocline at thirty feet. The temperature line was as sharp as a razor—cold above, frigid below. Just when I'd gotten

used to it, when I thought I'd gotten as cold as I could get, we hit the second thermocline layer at seventy feet. And we kept descending, following the yellow rope that was no longer yellow at this depth, but pale gray. Even the blue stripes in Lopez's suit were starting to seep away. I decided the rope couldn't have been this long, ravelled in its net bag on the surface.

Slowly, the darkness below us intensified. I swept across it with my flashlight. One moment, nothing but water. The next moment, there they were—black Ys and Xs of wood; branches; twigs doing aimless somersaults. It was a huge, skeletal landscape of lines and cracks, as if a whole sphere of the water had been frozen, then shattered.

I was looking from above at the bare branches of an enormous tree—a bird'seye view. It was a goddamn pecan tree at the bottom of the lake.

I heard an omnipresent plink, plink: Lopez, getting my attention by knocking the butt of his knife against his air tank. I could barely see him, two feet away from me, until I shone the flashlight on him. He was waving one palm horizontally over the knife—the sign to level out.