Acts of Nature

SEVENTEEN

I was in the water, waist deep, sloshing around at the edges of the raised cabin deck, one eye peeking up under the two-by- eight stringers for some sign of a trap door, the other watching for Wally.
I had climbed back up on top of the structure when it became apparent that there was no way I was getting into the mysterious room from the inside. I’d already dismantled part of the metal frame of the other bed next to Sherry, an old prison trick inmates pulled to salvage strong enough chunks of metal to shave sharp and make killer shivs out of. I used one of the unsharpened chunks as a pry tool but it had been useless against the frame of the security door and after I worked for an hour to peel back a piece of baseboard and then chopped at the low corner of the wall, I gave up.
Outside, I even climbed back up on the roof where I’d found access before and scoured the panels for a ceiling entry to the other room. I found a vent that might have been for recirculated air. And a damaged edge I was able to peek into, only to find a secondary sheath over the room, some kind of fiberboard or waterproof polymer that was too tough to gouge through.
“You look too frustrated, Max,” Sherry had said when I gave up and rejoined her. The aspirin from the medical kit had brought her fever down some. Her eyes were more alert. I’d opened a can of sliced peaches I’d found warm in the small refrigerator and used my fingers to fish out individual pieces and feed them into her mouth. The sugar and solid food had helped.
“Those are just my normal age lines,” I said, tightening my face to make the look more severe. “You certainly know that by now.”
Again the light grin came to her face, accented by the glistening smear of peach juice on her lips.
“No. That look is you grinding on something. The other is frustration at something that’s beating you.”
“OK,” I admitted. “There’s got to be a way into that f*cking room.”
I told her what I’d found through the roof, the change in materials that seemed only to surround that half of the building.
“Why would someone build one part of the cabin one way and the other so much more fortified?”
“Fortified or waterproof?” Sherry said.
“Both,” I said. I had traced the electrical fines from the small refrigerator and a waterline from the sink. Both went through the floorboards in the direction of the other room. I’d taken another trip outside in search of a generator room I might have missed. Nothing. The electrical supply was in the other room as well.
“High-tech lock, waterproofed and fortified. There’s something valuable inside,” she said.
“Out here, in the middle of nowhere?” I tossed it back to her.
“Drug drop. Distribution point?”
“Cop thinking,” I said, with a cynical twinge.
“Duh, yeah.”
I might have thought of it myself. But it had been a while since I’d worked narcotics and only in the streets of South Philadelphia, never in the swamp.
“OK. It’s isolated enough for drop-offs, but the only way you distribute from here is by airboat,” I said. “Only way quick enough.”
“Too piecemeal and too expensive,” she said and ate more of the peaches.
I stared off toward the end of the bed, like I was thinking, but really looking at her toes, for discoloration. Though her mind was sharper and her mood higher with the food and rest, we were going to have to get her out of here soon. The chances of someone coming by or looking for us were minimal. Even if Billy started looking for me, which he would, or if Sherry’s supervisors got anxious, would there be anyone dispatched to my river shack? And when they found it, if it were still standing, would they make a jump in reasoning that I’d been stupid enough to take us somewhere by boat? It could be days and we sure as hell didn’t have days. I didn’t see a way to patch my canoe with the materials we had. Whatever was in that room might be our savior if we were to have one.
“The Fisher Body plant in Lansing, Michigan,” Sherry said. Her tone turned my head because she did not seem to be directing the odd and disconnected words to me but to the wall. She was looking off to a memory.
“I must have still been a teenager. It was one of those stories in the news that for the first time took my attention away from that bullshit in high school.”
I knew Sherry had grown up in Michigan, the daughter of blue-collar parents, working class in an area and in a time where working class was a prideful tide.
“I remember it because I was scared to death back then of being stuck somewhere without air. Maybe I’d been swimming somewhere in the lake and lost my breath or maybe my brothers had locked me in the closet or something when I was little. But I was always scared back then that I would be trapped somewhere without air.”
I looked closely into her face, then straight into her eyes, checking for the dilation of her pupils. If she was going into some kind of hallucination from the trauma, I might have to just patch the canoe as best I could and make a run for it. I took her hand in mine.
“There’s plenty of air, Sherry. We’re OK. All right? You can breath here, baby.”
Her eyes reacted and she shifted them to me.
“Oh, shit. No, I’m sorry, Max,” she said. “I’m not flipping out on you. No. I was thinking of an old story, back in my hometown.
“There was this accident at the auto factory. There were these three workers, guys in the paint department on the line at Fisher Body where all the cars for GM were assembled. These guys were doing cleanup in one of these deep pits where they dipped the cars for rust-proofing or something. They were pits that were sealed and waterproof. Maybe it was some kind of maintenance that they had to go down in these things and clean up excess paint or something.
“But whatever they were using, maybe some new solvent or something to break down the paint, they got themselves surrounded in a cloud of the stuff. They couldn’t breath and started choking and collapsed and when the supervisor realized what was happening, he went down the ladder to help them and he was overcome by the stuff too. By the time someone got an oxygen mask on to go down for them, they were all dead.”
She was staring at the wall again, remembering. I gave her time. Sherry is not someone you ask too early what the hell her point is.
“After that, the company installed trapdoors in all the sealed pits, a way to get out if something happened, a quick- release porthole in the floor that someone could get out of if they fell in or got caught down there.”
Again, I got caught looking at her eyes, like I had many times since I’d met her, amazed.
“I’ll go down under the room and check it out,” I said. “Good idea,” Sherry said and smiled, a real smile this time, and not just a grin.
I was in the water, waist deep, watching for Wally, looking for a seam, a handle, any indication of a trapdoor. I knew the stringers below were probably creosote-soaked timber. Out here the wood would rot in no time in the constant moisture even if it was up above water level. I found the timbers green and slick with algae. The odor was ripe in the way a compost pit would be if you stuck your nose into it. The fingers of my left hand were curled up over the edge of the deck and I was using the flashlight in my right to beam the spaces between the stringers. My feet were squishing in muck and it took effort to pull each one up out of the suction and take a step down the line. My ears were tuned to any stirring in the nearby grasses, any grunt from a large predator with a bad eye. I worked my way all the way around three sides before the light caught a raised anomaly in the otherwise black-green underbelly of the cabin. Spotting down parallel stringers there was an edge, barely an inch difference, protruding from the flat board surface. It was about eight feet in from where I stood.
I had to let go of the deck and it felt peculiar to me to hesitate doing so. I also had to dip deeper into the water, to my chest, to get my head down under the first stringer, and I thought twice about that movement also. There was something spooking me about being deeper in the dark murk that had not been there before. I shook it off and, keeping the flashlight above water, reached for the next handhold while pulling my boot out of another sucking hole. From close up, the edge I’d spotted became a square, positioned between two stringers. I scraped at it with the edge of the flashlight. Metal. Again of the stainless variety to resist erosion or rust. In the shadow of the wood beam I found the handle, a lever really, of the kind you see in submarine movies or on oven kilns. There was no key entrance on the rounded end, an indication that it did not lock from this side. I twisted and it moved, slightly. I put some muscle into it and heard the internal cylinder slide. It would make sense of course that an escape hatch would not be locked to keep rescuers at bay, if that was indeed what it was for. When I heard the click of metal snapping loose of metal, I pressed up on the door. Stuck. I had to reposition my feet so I could get some leverage and tried again, this time with my forearm, and I heard the sucking noise of a seal being broken and the door finally gave way. Once open, the smell of sweet musty air poured down over my head and face, air that had not mingled with its outside brother in a very long time.