*
Dexter watched his boys powering the air machine like figures on a clock. He was struggling, as he had from the start of this ride, to do the single thing he was worst at: nothing. His idleness made everything around him register on a scale from irksome to intolerable: Anna’s cohorts holding her ankles to guide her feet into the massive diving shoes; the Negro’s hand under her chin while they attached the harness, or whatever the hell it was. Their insularity made him envious—not just of the men but all three of them. They were working together, two men and a girl, with evident ease. Even after the diving suit was on and she no longer looked like a girl, he was resentful of their shared knowledge, their nomenclature and expertise. As they helped her backward into the harbor, Dexter took his first cigarette in five years and placed it between his lips. Enzo darted from the shadows in the nick of time to light it.
Smoking woozily after his long abstinence, Dexter pulled a chair alongside the skipper’s and tipped back his head in solidarity with the ancient’s palsied neck. A stroke. Even in the cold, a sheen of sweat coated the skipper’s face. Dexter was near enough to smell the tomato juice he drank more or less constantly (slopping it liberally onto his clothes)—for ulcers, he said, though it seemed to Dexter that so much tomato juice might well be the ulcers’ cause. There it was, in a tin pail at his side. A riot of stars flashed overhead.
“Who could’ve guessed, Skipper,” Dexter said. “That we had all these stars right over New York City.”
The skipper gave a cough, unimpressed. He was a New York skipper, accustomed to navigating by landmarks and shore lights. The stars had confounded him. But when it came to the harbor, its winds and currents and tricky passes, he knew every bump and hole, the whereabouts of eddies neglected by the currents—places where objects would sink and not wash ashore. And he knew how to find those places again, or so he claimed.
“Come now, Skipper. You’ll get used to the stars.”
A bark of contradiction, which Dexter understood to mean that the war would end, the lights would go back on, and the New York sky would resume looking as it had.
“You’re right, of course,” Dexter said. Then, very softly, “Say, you’re certain this is the place?”
The skipper barked his umbrage at the very question.
“How can you know, when everything looks so different in this dark?”
The mariner tapped his temple below the white cap he always wore aboard, its starched cleanliness a bizarre contrast to his tomato-streaked squalor. “Nothing moves,” he said, startling Dexter with the abrupt clarity of his speech. “In here.”
“I see.”
Soon restlessness overtook Dexter again. He considered trying to speak with Nestor, the helmsman, but that was hopeless. Once garrulous, Nestor had clammed up some years back after receiving a fright. Instead, Dexter approached the front of the boat, where his boys were sweating at the air machine. One of the Naval Yard men was there, a sour-faced towhead whose disapproval was thick enough to butter bread. His eyes were fixed on two gauges at the front of the air machine.
“They turning those wheels fast enough?” Dexter asked him.
“So far.”
“Oh, they won’t let up.”
“They’d best not.”
A provocation. Its touch was like an electric current, so bracing and welcome that Dexter refrained from pointing out to the mug right then and there who was boss. He went instead to the other Naval Yard man, the Negro, who stood at the opposite end of the boat near the diving ladder. The lines attached to Anna ran through his hands into coils at his feet. His eyes were fixed on the water.
“What are you watching, exactly?” Dexter asked.
“Her bubbles,” the Negro said, not moving his eyes. “See them breaking? The current carries them; she isn’t necessarily right in that place.” He seemed friendly, neutral, difficult to read the way Negroes often were—except to other Negroes, he supposed.
“How do you know where she is?”
The Negro held up the cords in his hand. “I let these in and out as she moves, so there’s never too much slack. That way I can feel her signal pulls.”
“Is it dangerous? What she’s doing?”
“Not if we all do our jobs right.”
They watched the bubbles, a pale boil on the harbor’s inky surface. “Your partner,” Dexter said. “Why has he a diving suit on?”
“There’s always a second diver in case the lines get fouled. Or something else goes wrong.”
“Who’d watch the air machine dials if he went down?”
“Are you volunteering, sir?”
Dexter laughed, impressed. In four simple words, the man had managed to both establish a jocular familiarity and assure Dexter that he understood exactly who was in charge. A diplomat.
“Can the one machine make enough air for two divers?” Dexter asked.
“They’re designed to. At the Yard, we use one per diver, but this one tested well for efficiency. With those gentlemen at the wheels, we’d get the maximum.”
Dexter smiled, having finally received the compliment he’d been fishing for. “Say, suppose the machine should stop working?” he said. “What then?”
“No reason for that to happen,” the Negro said evenly, but Dexter sensed a new wariness in him. “Even so, she’d have about eight minutes of air left inside the dress. More than enough to get her topside.”
A signal must have come through the cord he was holding, for he jerked it firmly several times, waited, then jerked again. Then he walked backward along the gunwale toward his partner at the bow, letting out slack as he went, eyes still fixed to the bubbles. After a brief conversation, the towhead left the air machine, lifted the weighted line, and walked it quickly to the bow of the lighter, not far from the air machine. Dexter sidled up to the Negro, who explained that “the diver,” as he referred to her, had made a complete sweep around the line without finding anything. Now she would begin a second circle in a new location.
“This could take forever,” Dexter said. “How long can she stay down?”
“Two hours free and clear. Longer, and she’ll need to decompress on the way up. We’ve only a bosun’s chair for that, but we’ll manage it.” The Negro glanced at his wrist, where Dexter saw three watches strapped. “She’s been down thirty-eight minutes.”
“I’d like to go down,” Dexter said. “And help her search.”
The suggestion was pure impulse; a verbal essay that was more an expression of general impatience than a proposal. But the moment Dexter uttered the words, his mind locked around the idea. “I’m serious.”
The Negro inclined his head politely. “Have you ever dived before, sir?”
“I’m a quick study.”
“With all due respect, from a safety angle, it would be out of the question.”