Idelba said, “Gentlemen, the dredge is gonna start sucking up whatever’s down there. I’m aiming it at the metal you discovered, which shows on my metal detectors too, so good work there. It’ll get real noisy when I turn the vacuum on, and what comes up at this end we’ll run through sieves. We won’t be able to hear each other, so if you see anything come out on the deck, wave so I can see you.”
By now she was shouting, because the whine of some motor or engine far louder than the previous motor was now screaming from the deckhouse under the bridge. It was so loud that it seemed possible that the entire tug was filled with whatever machine was running there below the deck. The vacuum cleaner from hell! Now they all had to shout right in each other’s ears if they were going to hear each other, but as most of them had their hands over their ears, this wasn’t going to work either. Thabo dug in a locker and brought out big plastic earmuffs for them all to put on, and after that things were much quieter, but they could only wave at each other.
The boys stood with Vlade and Mr. Hexter at the upper end of the dredge tube, and when it began to spew mud and gunk into a big box on the deck, they leaned over the box and inspected the brown-and-black flow. The familiar stink of anoxia filled the air, one of the smells of the city, here at its nastiest. They all wrinkled their noses and continued looking. Mud flowed down and out of a big meshed hole in the box, into a channel in the deck where hoses added water to the mix, and everything ran down the channel toward the stern and out a meshed gap back into the river. Vlade put on rubber gloves that went up to his elbow, then a dust mask over his nose, and began to finger through the mud in the box. It was obvious he had done this before.
A black plume of mud blossomed off the end of the tug as the vacuuming proceeded. The anoxic stench was pervasive and ugly. After about ten minutes of this, Idelba flipped a lever and the noise ground to a halt. Thabo and Vlade uncoupled the last section of tubing and began rooting around in the last tube. They dug out chunks of God knew what, put it under the hoses running into the channel on the deck, checked out whatever was revealed when the coating of mud was washed off, and then casually tossed what they had in hand overboard. Usually it was lumps of concrete or asphalt, sometimes soggy wood, which they inspected more closely; other times broken stones, or chunks of what looked like ceramic. A goat’s horn, a complete furry body of a raccoon or skunk maybe, giant clamshells, a big square bottle not broken, a fishing gaff, a drowned doll, many broken stones.
When the tube was cleared they began vacuuming again. Idelba guided the nozzle at the bottom, the old man looking over her shoulder intently. It was hard to believe he could interpret the blobs on the screens, but he seemed as interested as someone who knew what he was looking at. The noise was again incredible. The mud flowing through the box had nothing in it of any interest.
Again the tube clogged, again they cleared it by hand. Most of what they washed off now consisted of rounded stones, often broken, frequently shaped like giant eggs. When the vacuum was off Mr. Hexter said to them, “That’s glacial till! Most of Long Island is made of this stuff. It was left here at the end of the Ice Age. Means we’ve reached the old river bottom, maybe.”
Idelba nodded as she poked through the muck. “Unless you hit bedrock, you’re always dealing with till. Nothing else around this whole bay, except a little scrooch of soil on the land and mud under the water. Or landfill of various kinds. But mostly it’s till.”
After another clog was cleared they went back to it, but before the vacuum began its whining and screeching and roaring, Mr. Hexter said to Idelba, “So will you be able to tell when you’re as deep as that metal you detected?”
She nodded, and they were back to it.
Two clogs later they suddenly found themselves sorting through old fragments of wood, squared off and lathed to something like spars or thwarts. Everyone looked at each other wordlessly, eyebrows raised, eyes round. Pieces of an old ship—yes, these seemed to be pieces of an old ship. Back to another round of vacuuming with renewed interest, no doubt about it. The boys were hopping around looking at every lump in the channel on the deck, mostly stone after stone, pebble after pebble.
Then in the middle of the glaucous cronking of the upsuck, and the huge whine of the vacuum pump, a big clunk stopped everything. Something had hit the last tube filter hard. Idelba turned off the vacuum pump. They all took off their earmuffs. Thabo and Vlade delinked the tube from the box, and they began to dig in the muck caught on the tube’s filter.
Against the big mesh they found a wooden chest with a curved top, about two feet on a side, bound by strips of crumbly black that had colored the wood adjacent to them. Vlade tried to lift it out by himself and couldn’t. Thabo joined him, then Idelba, and they hefted it onto the deck, dropped it with a thump. Stefan and Roberto danced around the adults, crawled between them, sniffed the dead stench of the wet muddy wood. It was the smell of treasure.
Thabo picked up a short flat crowbar and looked at Idelba. Idelba looked at Mr. Hexter. Hexter nodded, grinning widely. “Be gentle,” he said. “It should be easy.”
It was. Thabo tapped the shorter end of the L into the seam between the box’s top and its side, next to a black metal plate that must once have included the box’s handle and lock; now it was just a knobbly mass. A few wiggles, a gentle lift, a scrape. Thabo twisted the crowbar and levered it up again. The top of the box came up with a liquid scrunch. And there in the box was a mass of coins. Slightly black, slightly green, but mainly gold. Gold coins.
They all cheered. They danced around howling deafly at the sky. It was great to see that the adults were just like Stefan and Roberto in this, that they still had that capacity in them even though grown up.
“There should be two boxes,” Mr. Hexter said loudly in response to a look from Idelba. “That’s what the manifest listed.”
“Okay,” Idelba said. “Let’s dig around a little, then. They were probably near each other to begin with.”
“Yes.”
So even though the boys were hopping around slapping hands and hugging, the adults turned on the vacuum again, and they all had to get their earmuffs back on and go through it all again. It was crazy. Stefan and Roberto stared at each other with their Can you believe this? looks. But crazy or not, after a couple more vacuuming sessions there was another big clunk, now characteristic and obvious, and they stopped the vacuum, unhooked the tube from the capture box, and lo and behold, another wooden chest.