Skeleton Sea

CHAPTER 5

The Sea Spray left the strange zone and headed “back to the barn,” as Captain Keasling put it.

She rebuffed all questions about the ailing sea creatures, about the frenzied crabs. “Go ask a biologist,” she said, and retreated into the wheelhouse.

There were none aboard.

There were only a couple of uneasy jokes. Should’ve brought a net, scoop up dinner. If I were a crab I’d get the hell out of there, too.

And then silence, thick as the fog.

Sometime later, someone shouted “Whale!”

I’d had my fill of sea creatures but I roused myself to turn and look. And I thought no, it’s not a whale, it’s something else. It was black and shiny, just breaking the surface, off in the near distance.

Doug Tolliver went to the rail and stared, and then he dashed to the wheelhouse and spoke to Captain Keasling, and then the Sea Spray abruptly turned course and headed straight for the thing that wasn’t a whale.

And then motored down.

Surprises upon surprises.

A scuba diver floated belly-up out here in the middle of nowhere, no other boat in sight.

A buzz ran through the passengers. Shock. Thrill.

The diver was in full gear. His buoyancy compensator was keeping him afloat, so he must have inflated the air bladder on the BC at some point. And then, it appeared, passed out. The regulator had fallen out of his mouth. He made no movements.

And then the captain and the boatman were in motion. Keasling shouted “get the horseshoe” and Lanny went running and Keasling backed the square end of the boat up to the diver, precise as a surgeon, and then Lanny reappeared wearing a life vest, carrying a harness, and he opened the gate that let onto the ladder and started down.

We ganged the rails to watch.

Lanny was already on the little dive platform just above the water line. He clipped himself to the ladder with a safety line and got on his knees and looped the horseshoe harness over the diver. And then Keasling was there at the gate. Lanny tossed her a coiled yellow rope that attached to the harness. She played out the rope, bellowing, “I need big strong men on the line,” and bird watchers and whale watchers alike scrambled and hauled. Lanny came up first, guiding the rope, bumping the diver aboard.

They stripped him of his BC and tank and laid him out on a bench.

The heavyset man, my neighbor who’d scorned pelicans, pushed his way forward—“I’m a doctor, I’m a doctor”—and he bent over the body.

Captain Keasling and Doug Tolliver herded the rest of us back.

The diver groaned and muttered words I did not understand.

And now the doctor was stripping the remainder of the diver’s gear. Mask, hood, weight belt, dive bag went onto the deck and Lanny edged in and shelved the equipment on the bench, out of the way. The doctor checked the diver’s vitals, flinging words. Alive. Shock. Hypothermia. And then he called Captain Keasling in close and asked her, “Is that from a jellyfish?”

I angled for a view and saw a wicked red blistering welt across the diver’s face.

“That jelly we saw earlier?” somebody said. “With the purple racing stripes?”

The talk on the boat turned to the ghostly jellyfish, although who knew where that had been in relation to where we were now. In any case, surely there was more than one jellyfish in this ocean.

Captain Keasling studied the diver. “Purple-stripe gives a hellacious sting. Not usually lethal.”

Well that was reassuring.

Walter moved close to me. “I don’t believe in coincidences.”

I nodded. The missing fisherman, the damaged boats, the strange zone, and now the diver. All in the same patch of ocean. And yet, it’s a big ocean. If we looked in the right places we’d find a dozen calamities, a dozen inexplicable zones. Or more. Or less. I really had no idea because I found this ocean more mysterious than the center of the earth. Still, I did know my carbon-oxygen cycle — I knew that half the breaths I take come courtesy of the sea. And I was growing a little protective of it.

My attention caught on Lanny. He had hold of the diver’s mesh bag, strangling it by the neck, twisting the mesh around something reddish inside, and I wouldn’t have paid it much heed but for the stricken look on Lanny’s face.

I saw Captain Keasling take notice as well, wearing that frown of hers.

I wondered if the boatman was somehow mishandling the diver’s gear. I drifted over to Keasling with the intention of asking if Lanny was okay, putting in a good word for him, in appreciation for the fennel and the poem. I said, “He did a great job. Pulling in the diver.” I added, “You both did.”

She gave a brusque nod. “We train.”

“Ah.”

“My boatman’s a little slow.” She tapped her head.

“I realize that.”

She turned to me now. “Doesn’t mean he needs a special friend.”