Blue Field(29)

So, Bowman said. Been awhile, Marilyn. Remind me?

Spooky Bowman. With his chubby face and stocky build, fluffy light-brown curls threaded with silver and portentous bags under his eyes, he seemed like an aging cherub. She guessed he was only in his late thirties and not the forties or even fifty that he seemed—his kind of diving tended to prematurely weather the few who managed it. Some of his pushes were legendary, and his glazed eyes—mark of the ten-thousand-logged-dives diver, permanently nitrogen-saturated and codeine-enhanced, eternally mildly stoned—betrayed an inward-looking sheen, as if he were attuned to some interior mechanism. Cagey Bowman. She recalled how he always gave the impression of taking in more than he expressed. He scooped the cat now from his lap and carefully set it on the floor. Then he grabbed his beer and waved it at her. Come on Marilyn, he wheedled.

She could smell her own sweat. She’d done her training on these very grounds, with Rand had visited Bowman’s personal lair half a dozen times. The old feeling of being scrutinzed and judged here hung over her still. Maybe a year? she said.

He widened his eyes. Right, he said, stretching the word out as if in disbelief.

The cat in her lap stretched and purred. Hello kitty, she said, palming the animal’s vibrating throat. She picked up a paw. It was wide and flat and the cat curled its eight toes around her fingers. She’d forgotten. Bowman and his collection of polydactyls. This one’s pretty friendly, she said.

He was smiling and not smiling. She is, he said. That’s why I’m keeping her. The others I waste.

He tipped his head and laughed then raised the bottle to his mouth and glugged. Before he’d retired early to cave-binge and scare the tourists he’d been a silk-suit on the investment market. At least a dozen years later he apparently still relished playing the role of redneck hick to the hilt. He put the beer back on the coffee table and, squinting, held his arms in front of him as if sighting along a rifle. He singled out a ribby feline by the floor lamp. Pow, he went. Sometimes my breeding program goes squirrelly. I use the mutants for target practice.

Smart kitty, Marilyn said.

Yeah, Bowman drawled. Oh yeah.

She picked the cat off her lap and deposited it on the floor. She nudged it away and plucked up her beer. Sip and shut it. She wondered how much Bowman knew about the accident. All Rand’s phone calls in the aftermath—most likely some were with guru Bowman, long-time pal who looked right now as if he were trying to stifle a sneeze. Or a laugh. Fine, she thought. Let him. She just drank and listened for the shower to stop.

Rand emerged wearing clean khakis, his long toes gripping the weedy shag. A cat immediately began rubbing his calves. Sorry Mare, he said. Hot water ran out.

Honey, Bowman said before she could reply. Sorry honey. Get it straight, Petrie.

She rose fast. I’m good, she said. Think I’ll call it a night though.

Sure? Rand said warily.

Bowman snorted. Petrie, buddy, he said. Didn’t you hear the news? The lady says she’s good.

Full-cheeked, snub-nosed. Broad-chested with a pudge-rimmed stomach showing beneath his tight-fitting tee. A comic book, pale-skinned, iron-man baby. Larval. A textbook label sprang to mind. Neotenous.

Fuck you, Bowman, Rand said. Where the f*ck’s my beer?

Thanks, Bruce, she said, and shuffled a few feet toward the guest room, then turned for another look.

He hoisted his bottle as if toasting her. Why no, Marilyn, he said. Thank you.





29


She woke late. To her relief Bowman was gone. She had her shower while Rand made coffee then carried their mugs into the leafy outside. In the filigreed shade sequined with cat eyes she and Rand unhooked the trailer and stocked the back of the pickup with what they needed for the day. They drove to the nearby air-fill station where they helped each other lug their doubles then they hit the road for real. Leaping, her stomach in knots. The live oaks and pines by the side of the road seemed prickly as barbed wire. Soon they parked on a dirt pull-off and got out. Flies and mosquitoes buzzed and stung. She scuffled through her prep and, squeezing her head through her drysuit’s tight neck seal, experienced sudden vertigo—claustrophobia’s flip side. She fought the flailing urge to belly down on the ground. Unfit. Fucked. She should call the dive. Forget it.

Might as well bury herself. She folded the neoprene flap on her seal and zipped. I’m good, she told herself. Fine, thanks! Rand slid a hand toward her, a praying mantis perched on his finger. Hello there! she chirped, and it rotated its green-cube head in her direction. She wondered how she might appear, J-pegged into its dimension.

And then the weight of her rig seemed to drive her along the dirt footpath and onto a wooden platform and down a ladder to the spring. The water had a greenish-brown tinge in which gray particulate appeared like oversized dandruff—far less current charged this spring system than the one she observed last night, and less roaring discharge meant greater impurity but also an easier swim in and out. Also the cave was relatively shallow and she knew the site from previous dives. Given her rustiness, good for me, she thought as she flippered the surface to the far side and peered in. Disarticulated tree roots. Scabby suckerfish and bushy algal blooms. And a gash in the bank’s outcropping of limestone—another deception. Entrance to a Karst netherworld of conduits and drains. And yet so much more than mere plumbing—million-millennium-old passages carved by water. Rock beds for fossilized trilobites and ammonites—the earliest cave explorers—and relative-youngster mastodons, and the even more youthful Arawaks, the region’s extinct indigenous peoples. Sightless and translucent living arthropods and fish flicked among the fossils like the dead’s dreams. When overviewed on a map, the various passages—explored and surveyed by divers like Rand and Bowman—appeared dendritic, as if the cave were itself a neural system, a rock-creature alive in its own ancient mineral time older than wars and sex and beheadings over inaugurations and rights of return and every niggling Am I right? As she waited for her husband on the water’s surface, dangling above the cave opening, she felt like small bait.