Flame Angels Read online

  But this group was young, six fit divers doing fine to seventy feet, where one saw something amazing, something deep. Ravid swam around to ask the guy if he was okay, and the guy beamed, peeling off his mask and ditching his regulator to better spread his Cheshire grin. Then he took off downward, full speed in pursuit of perfection. Maybe he saw the stark difference between ultimate beauty and what he’d return to in Tokyo. Ravid hadn’t known nitrogen narcosis to enhance physical prowess, but the guy wasn’t fazed for a hundred feet, till Ravid caught his ankle and jerked him to a stop, then manhandled him up into a cross-chest carry, reaching around to stick a spare regulator into the guy’s mouth. The guy didn’t resist or struggle but breathed hard. No wonder, as Ravid checked his depth gauge: 180 and sinking. Then he saw the worst of it: five more obedient Japanese tourists had followed to 180 feet and awaited further guidance from management.

  Ravid would shrug at that point in the telling: “I called it a bounce — no decompression necessary if you touch your depth for a few seconds and then bounce back up.”

  It was a great story to tell, because nobody died or embolized or got bent, though they could have, and he’d done the right thing. He couldn’t tell the story locally any more, because everyone had heard it too many times, but the tourists still loved it, especially in the interim, killing time on the boat between the deep dive and the shallow dive, when a body needs to hang out for an hour or so to ditch some of the excess nitrogen. Ravid would set it up with a final warning on nitrogen narcosis, so that someone would ask if he, Ravid, ever got it, and he would reply, “I got a slight case once. I saw a mermaid, but she was a little bit chunky.” Not the stuff for primetime, but a boatload of tourists on reprieve from the dull commute would love to laugh their asses off. Soon came the fond farewells, the gratitude and tips.

  Not that a man in his prime is proud of working for tips, though the gratitude felt different than, say, for a meal well served or a beer properly poured or a car efficiently retrieved from the valet lot. These tips showed respect and gratitude bordering on love. These tips were tribute for safeguarding against so many things taught in certification training but not discussed on board, because risk is far-ranging and could never be eliminated. Diving offers fun and fulfillment, and the tourists felt the watchful eye, keen mind, experience and wisdom.

  Still, a nagging mother would say, “It’s tips. You want to call it ‘professional fees’? Go ahead. Make yourself happy.”

  As if a man could be wrong by making himself happy, but that’s another story.

  Suffice it to say that the whole experience was required every day, including all components of what Carl Geizen, aka Crusty Geezer, called “the package.” The package opened with first impressions on hygiene and mechanical soundness and went on through the niggling details, from the gooey squish and sugar factor on the Danish pastries to the towel-dried bench seats. Package components gained nuance and sophistication from there, to where the dive team donned wetsuits and booties, rigged regulators to tanks and slid into buoyancy compensators like Degas’s ballerinas prepping for another peak performance. Reading wrist computers, fastening hog clips and quick releases, zipping zippers, checking knives, cameras and housings and applying the No-Fog Goop — oh, yeah, and turning valves to open the air supply, as if to remind the attentive audience that this will be fun if you don’t get complacent.

  Then came the descent in warm, clear water to the grottos, ledges, walls and currents of the magical world.

  Back on board, enriched for life, guests were further entertained on the interval between dives or the lovely cruise back to the dock. The package was made fatter, sweeter and more rewarding to all parties with a bit of narrative at each juncture, each story designed to fit the allotted time. Crusty called the story component critical and necessary, and most valuable when it was a twenty-four-karat line of bullshit.

  Stories didn’t need to be wild or humorous; Crusty just liked those stories best, maybe because they best fit his worldview. When all the guests were male and over twenty, the crew would dummy up in preparation for Crusty’s favorite entrée. He’d clear his throat and lob a goober to leeward, no dangles and no wipe necessary. He’d grumble like an elder down from the mountain to these surly young’uns, “You know... I reached a point in life where a perfect day for me is four hours of work, nice people, nice charter like this. Then I head out for a round of golf. Then I go home for a blowjob.”

  A few eyebrows rose on that note, with isolated laughs of agreement, approval or envy, till one of the crew asked, “How’s that plan working out for you, Crusty?”

  “Oh, not too bad, really. I got a couple more weeks of yoga to get my neck stretched out, you know. But I’m getting there.”

  Most groups strained momentarily before cutting loose the male bonding guffaw. This, too, pumped tips.

  Crew stories were neither idle nor random but tried and true; a story could be tested, once. Many tales were seldom told before a long warm-up, like, say, with the rare tourists profiling as true reef addicts. Reef-addicted tourists dove two tanks daily for three days in a row, or seven, demonstrating commitment that would warrant service and generate tips.

  Like the story Ravid told for a few days till Crusty told him to shit-can the near-death experience stuff, because it scared the bejesus out of the tourons, made them wince and worry rather than relax. You want your passengers happy, Crusty counseled, not anxious, not thinking about their lives, jobs, debts and all that crap they came this far to get away from. You tell them jokes, not how a goofy crowd nearly died.

  Ravid disagreed, saying most of these people were eager to cheat death. They couldn’t get that action in the office, unless you counted financial death, which had zilch to do with life in the real lane. Besides that, a story about diver error makes people more alert on their own dives.

  And he itched to tell a story that was practically garden fresh. It happened commonly on routine runs with apparently reasonable groups heading out to the channel off Lahaina Roads and the sunken submarine — sunk for good — with its deck at 110 feet. That was advanced, a deep dive in anyone’s book and nearly twice the sport-diving safe limit of sixty feet, but what could you do, hang out at sixty feet in the water column? No, you couldn’t. So you told them it was advanced, like nearly any wreck dive, with more rigorous safety requirements. You asked them if they wanted to take it on, and of course they did, because any dive is cake if you don’t choke, and they’d heard about it, how unbelievably great it was, which it really wasn’t, given the return on the effort, but every diver in the world suffers a bit of the macho burden. Anyway, it was a level bottom, so the deck was also level, so nobody could dip ten or twenty feet below the dive plan, unless they went off the deck, which they should be smart enough to avoid, though six tourists of variable intuition and skill could be a handful. Well, if nobody tried to kill himself — the women are generally more composed by the time they make the grade to that depth — you could pull twenty-five minutes right off the dive table, as long as nobody sucked a tank down in fifteen, which happens from time to time, when macho gets outpaced by sheer, raw fear. Otherwise, it was twenty-five minutes to money in the bank. Then you hung out at fifteen feet for five minutes on the way up, call it a safety stop, and you were done for an hour and a half, till the second dive, which was shallow and easy.

  That was if you caught the submarine at slack tide with no current, about an hour-long window twice a day. Otherwise, it was a three-knot tide, which doesn’t sound fast till you factor in that Olympic gold runs are around 1.9 knots. Still, it wasn’t insurmountable, and nine submarine days out of ten got you a sensible, attentive group treading easily in a bunch near the anchor rode, holding hands while grasping the rode in turn and descending to sixty feet for a check and okay. The scene had comic potential most days, which is a good thing, to a point, cutting the anxiety with a little laugh at six scuba tourists strung out like pennants in the current halfway between the bottom and the surfac
e — till one let go, and the dive leader chased him down easy enough but then blew half a tank getting him back to the anchor rode. Or maybe the chase took an extra minute, putting the leader and wayward tourist out of sight, compelling the others to let go and follow, flying through the water column over a bottom dipping to 180. Even with visibility at a hundred feet, you’re down to a wing and a prayer, hoping nobody gets any stupider than he absolutely must.

  What else could a dive leader do but chase down the idiot who let go? Nothing is the correct answer, though the chronic mishap boiled down to the dive leader’s fault for not banging the procedural mallet hard enough on the tourons’ heads. When the submarine dive went wrong too many times, it was left to Crusty to utilize the special rig and technique he liked to claim credit for inventing: using a quick-release pin that freed the anchor rode from the Samson post on the dive boat deck and then securing the rode to a spare mooring buoy, then throwing the buoy overboard, thus freeing the boat quick enough to chase the bubbles — slow enough to see them yet fast enough to find them. Crusty commonly claimed credit for vision, foresight and water wisdom in the same sentence he might damn you and your heirs to hell for putting his extraordinary skill to task. Crusty got his name for good reason, because he liked to save the day, every day, and then spend the rest of the day saying what a miserable worthless piece of bilge scum you were for letting things get so out of hand. Crusty’s first job on arrival at the submarine was to give Ravid the helm, with a reminder not to fuck everything up. Then he went over the side and down to the sub deck to make sure the anchor was in fact on the deck, so the descending divers wouldn’t descend any deeper than the deck, wouldn’t get bent and sue. He needed to prime the loop on the shank to another ingenious quick-release line, all requiring a mere handful of seconds. That’s where Ravid first learned about the bounce, and that you don’t even need decompression tables if it’s only a bounce. Some days the release was jammed, but Crusty could fix that, too, in less than two minutes, and then he’d come up with his slowest bubbles, or with his medium bubbles, anyway. He couldn’t very well hang out: “I can’t be expected to babysit an anchor and get these people in the water at the same time, can I?”

  Ravid learned a great deal from Crusty but frankly felt relieved to leave the Westside for a better boat off the Southside. Sure, Crusty’s constant chiding was mostly justified and insightful, but the feelings of ineptitude and error Crusty constantly engendered got to be as destructive as they were helpful. Ravid wished the Westside crew all the best and felt ahead of the game, no longer chasing down wayward tourist divers with the spare anchor buried under a load of spare line. Engine failure could put a boat aground, which could put a boat on the bottom. It didn’t happen during Ravid’s time, maybe by sheer macho willpower, or maybe it was sheer dumb luck. Or maybe they’re the same thing.

  At any rate, Ravid and Crusty parted with mutual good cheer. “Take care, brother,” Ravid warmly offered, to which Crusty grasped his upright hand in the local style, drew him near for a half hug and offered his own gift of spirit:

  “Aloha, waterman.”

  It was the ultimate compliment. It indicated matriculation to the unofficial, mostly unspoken rank of waterman bestowed by general consensus or, on rare occasions, by the saltiest veterans. A waterman had achieved intuition, skill and experience in seawater at all depths, in all weather, all conditions and all circumstances, buoyant or lacking therein. The low mumble of it filled Ravid’s heart and made things right, both back and forward, securing their time together as good time, as time for making a living with nobody dying, and for securing their friendship too. Still, Ravid wondered when the day would come for Crusty to quick-release himself from sanity and a last view of the tropical blue sky.

  Then came the very worst of the stories, those told strictly in confidence among local divers, stories that spread like brushfire but never beyond the working crews — stories that would never go away, even if the principals went away, stories indelible as tattoos with horrific images.

  Like the instructor who wasn’t freely discussed but whose impression on the fleet was uniformly negative. A capable diver and journeyman photographer known for macro work showing ciliary structure and attitude, he captured a rare scene, plankton that looked choreographed by Busby Berkeley — all legs and bodices, top hats and tails in tiers of chorus lines in a grand finale fit for Neptune’s ball. Known for incessant bragging on his superior skills, vast experience and specific expertise in bottom knowledge, dive table discrepancies, correct safety stops and photography, including composition, exposure, strobe angle, and on and on, he made people wonder why he wouldn’t shut up. His skills were apparent, most often modest and widely known. So if everybody knew of them, why did he insist on a browbeating? He became tolerated, more or less, despite knowing every detail and consequence of every behavior with judicial superiority, calling blame on any vessel or person violating his code of diving conduct. If a boat offered carbonated beverages in the interval between dives, he yelled across the water that CO2 in the system will show up just peachy in the autopsy when some poor, innocent tourist gets bent and embolized because of such a dumb fucking error. Naturally, the fleet avoided him, with nobody even slightly motivated to point out that CO2 is immediately absorbed and then offed — or that he could stick a Coke up his ass, diet or classic.

  So his comeuppance seemed inevitable in the natural course of events. With notable superiority in exploration, fearlessness and sea sense, this arrogant fellow discovered a cave opening on an eighty-foot bottom and went in to explore and discover further. Nobody doubted the drive or skill at hand, to a point. Sure enough, the cave opening proved big enough for access at a forty-five degree angle for about another hundred feet, to a narrower but still manageable bend. At that point, the depth gauge showed 130 feet from the surface. From there, the opening widened for much more comfort and came up at another forty-five degrees to a chamber big enough for six divers to surface and tread without banging into each other or the lava walls — yes, surface.

  By a quirk, the roof of the chamber was watertight, or else the chamber was fed by bubbles of some kind at a greater rate than the rate of leakage. The net result was that the divers were back up to ninety feet from the real surface but were actually much farther away. They could remove their masks and regulators to grin and say hello to each other. They could crack a joke or tell a story. They couldn’t exactly breathe the gas in the room, a moderately noxious mix of CO2 and something astringent that caused the lungs to constrict and rebel.

  Never mind. Anyone could short gasp a breath or two and get a story or a punch line out, all the while notching a unique groove on the old adventure belt, having a scuba klatch in a private room at ninety feet — make that 170 feet, all told, to the real world. Machismo motivation never led to a destination so rich in overview and retelling; what happened when we were in the Room.

  The Room soon became the be-all, end-all destination for tourists on the inside track to the very realest of extreme thrills. A few took cameras. Photos from the room were more sought after than spondylidae — thorny oyster shells in garish pastels with intricate spines and flutes in a flat finish, found in former times at thirty feet but now unfound till 180 feet, because all the shallower thorny oysters got plucked by humanity to prove something or other, then set on shelves to catch dust. The shells became an incurable proof of machismo for the guys who got bent fetching their thorny oysters too deep. Some of those divers survived with difficult images and tales, till thorny oysters were associated with instability, idiocy and danger. What a relief.

  A photo starring Me(!) in the Room, on the other hand, seemed more worthwhile, courageous, pertinent, and tangible proof of the adventure-lust coursing in these veins.

  Soon those who bought admission to the Room were not allowed to take cameras, because of the safety hazard imposed by the ocular incursion disparity or the peripheral dangle or the snag factor or some such. Only the misguided dive instruct
or was allowed to take a camera, because, after all. Each diver was photographed in the room and could buy an 8 × 10 afterward for thirty bucks, with a full menu of additional prints at varying prices, after all. The photos were copyrighted, so scanning or otherwise generating non-authorized copies was strictly forbidden, as if by law. The fleet’s general smirk could not compensate for collective embarrassment.

  For a while, another dive instructor felt the spirit of commerce on this rich new vein, especially considering his unique skills as a diver and photographer. I can do this, Ravid thought, counting the dollars that would fill his pocket. Nobody has exclusive rights to a dive site, and temptation cast a shadow. Consensus among the fleet and crews was that somebody would soon die — maybe somebody working his ass off right now, somebody seeking adventure instead of the daily grind, somebody innocent yet weakened by the greed and arrogance of somebody else. Ravid was urged to avoid the temptation.

  Scoffing at dire predictions and remaining insensitive to his errors in judgment, the offending instructor put an ad in a tourist magazine, claiming exclusivity to the Room. If you wanted it, you had to choose him, because only he knew where it was. Only he had a perfect safety record in finding the secret path to the Room. Only he could get you in and out without giving your insurance carrier an ulcer, and he wasn’t sharing. That’s what the ad said. The coconut wireless had it that he threatened to sue for infringement or something or other if any other boat tried to coax the location from a tourist who’d been guided to the Room.

  The Room was gladly forgotten within days of the death occurring there, within a few weeks of its unfortunate discovery.