Blue Field(34)
Cleargate—big and brilliant with white walls nearly a hundred feet floor to ceiling. Their lights blazed. With the inrushing current, she made easy progress. Numerous previously laid lines ran parallel then deviated off the main permanent one through other far-ranging tunnels—one leading to another cave system altogether. Easy for a novice—or someone rusty or otherwise impaired by illness or fatigue or stress or ego—to succumb to a second’s inattention and switch off the main line. To f*ck up royally and not know until too late to find the way out again. No worries about that here though—locked between Rand and Bowman, she might as well have been diving in a floodlit tin can. Even so she felt uneasy as she surged farther in. Once she called the dive she’d have to slam her way out against the current, more tired than when she began. Not the best scenario. And what was her turn-pressure again? Fear-pressured, she felt her breathing whoosh. She checked and rechecked her gas gage. Twenty minutes, thirty minutes passed. The needle dropping fast, she breathed faster in alarm, and so needed to breathe harder—caught in the vicious cycle of air hunger until, choking, she flailed her light. Bowman near-instantly drew alongside. He touched her shoulder and she snapped her thumb up. Get me the f*ck out now. He grasped her, expertly swinging her in the opposite direction. Then he gave her a firm push. Go. For a second, too stunned to respond, she allowed the current to whale her farther back inside. Then Bowman had her again. Another push. Swim, he yelled into his reg. Swim—and she knocked toward the exit and never looked back.
Outside the cave—in the basin, still on the bottom, heaving into her reg—she managed to check her computer. She jerked toward a scramble of sunken tree roots and completed her first stop. Numb. But okay. She ascended for nearly an hour, performing her decoms solo before crawling from the water to haul herself tree to tree to truck where the men were already breaking down their rigs and ignoring her. Fine! Except for some wonkiness in her left arm. Once Bowman and Rand had moved to the front of the pickup to unsuit and swig power drinks from their stash behind the truck’s seats, she blammed her tanks down hard on the truck’s gate and with difficulty un-velcroed the computer strap from her forearm. She struggled out of her seals and sleeves and gingerly unzipped her underwear and peeled it off. Mother. Fuck. Her left limb was swollen wrist to elbow. No pain yet but she knew what she was looking at—and now she looked back, could picture it all. Stupid. Fussing out of nerves at the bottom of the sink, she’d tightened her computer strap but then in her post-dive numbness she’d forgotten to loosen the strap again before ascending. Should have known better. Below, her suit and underwear compressed slightly but when coming up again they expanded. The tightening strap constricted her circulation. A textbook case. Nitrogen bubbles or even a single glister lodged at a vascular pressure point. This when the cave-like branches and tributaries of her arterial system should have been working as efficiently as possible. Stupid her. Stupid arm. From which she felt curiously unattached. Bent.
33
Only a little, she protested.
No such thing as a little bent, Bowman told her. We’ll go down to the chamber in Gainsville, I’ll even get in there with you. Those f*ckers know me pretty good. You and me, we’ll play cards, have a party. You’ll be the guest of honour. Now let me take a f*cking look.
A TV mounted above the bar blared a fascinating show in which someone might win something, a set of manipulations and negotiations which for a second she couldn’t possibly take her eyes off. Then she did. The screen provided illumination for most of the shack, revealing a gray-haired long-hair shucking oysters behind a counter with three empty stools lined against it. She and Bowman occupied some folding chairs at a scratched wooden table that held a saucer of packaged crackers in the middle. Bowman’s proposal—lock herself inside a twenty-foot-long steel-drum-like structure while medical personnel re-pressurized the bubble in her bloodstream to re-dissolve and allow it to be safely off-gassed—struck her as pure crap. Lots of people took mild hits and skipped the pony show. Like Bowman never had? Rand? How about tough Jane. Was she right? Marilyn asked, smiling through her teeth.
Fuck, Bowman said and slumped in his chair.
She stopped smiling. What she thought.
Listen, he said without much pep. We eat, we go.
He cut his eyes to the TV then the door. Rand was still outside, reorganizing gear. Also parked in the dusty lot were five motorcycles aslant like giant gleaming insects but with riders nowhere in sight, though they must be somewhere inside this plywood-board construction. It must have a hidden addition, an underground space where who knew what went on. One more deception. Her own had been to conceal her condition during the drive here from Cleargate—so far her cover only blown with Bowman, scotched when she’d gone to enter the bar with him and fumbled with the door handle. Now he leaned forward in his seat with apparent new resolve and, latching onto her arm, pulled up her jacket sleeve and squeezed. Still pretty numb. Lymphatic edema, he pronounced.
She reacquired her limb. On second thought, she mounted it awkwardly around his neck and laid her cheek against his collarbone, nuzzled his chin. He tensed but otherwise offered no resistance when she got her lips on his. Then she wiped her mouth with the back of her good hand and said, Thanks. Like I don’t know.
Bowman exhaled loudly and refused to look at her. After a moment he slapped the table with his palm. A little help here, he called to the bartender. Three draft, plus three dozen of your finest.