Chapter 2
Torren
Cerro Vista in August is a hundred and four degrees of a town pretending it's fine.
I was in the back bay of Compass Salvage with a Shovelhead on the lift and a coffee going to tar, and it was a good morning, because a good morning is one where nothing that happens has any water in it.
Amos was at the bench doing the crossword in pen, which is not confidence, it's just Amos.
"Four letters," he said. "Sea dog."
"No."
"That's not four letters."
"No is the answer to the question you're actually asking."
"I'm asking about a crossword."
"You're asking about a crossword the way a man asks a woman if she'd hypothetically like Italian food."
Amos put the pen down. "Salt," he said. "It was salt. Four letters. Sea dog is a different clue and I hadn't gotten to it."
"Sure."
"You're paranoid."
"I'm correct. They overlap sometimes."
The thing about this club is that nobody had said the word water to me in twenty-three months and everybody had been saying it constantly.
It's in the room. It's in the way Reyes stops talking when the Weather Channel does the tropics.
It's in the way nobody ever asks me to help carry the compressor.
They were being kind. It was unbearable.
Reyes came through with a parts box and set it down wrong, the way he does, and I moved it four inches, the way I do.
"You hear about Florida?" he said.
"No."
"There's a Florida thing."
"There's always a Florida thing."
"Cade was on the phone an hour."
"Cade's on the phone every day."
"Not standing up," Reyes said. "He does the thing where he stands up and walks to the window and then he doesn't say anything for a while." He picked at a fingernail. "Last time he did that was Louisiana."
"Then it's a Louisiana thing," I said, "and Bishop can go get wet again."
"Bishop's in Louisiana, that's why it was a Louisiana thing."
"Reyes."
"I'm just saying there's a Florida thing."
Ghost came in through the bay door, did a lap, and lay down on my foot, which is his opinion on most things.
Then Cade came out of the office with a printout in his hand, and I knew.
I knew before he crossed the floor. That's how it is with him — you can read the weather in his shoulders about four seconds before it arrives.
"Church," he said. "Ten minutes."
"That's fine," I said. "I'll be here."
"Torren."
"I'll be here, Cade."
He stopped at the lift. Put the printout face-down on the fender, which was worse than handing it to me.
"Nineteen miles off Key West," he said. "Manila galleon. Woman named Kwon found it clean and somebody lifted her survey off her laptop and filed on it Tuesday morning."
"Then get her a lawyer."
"Already did. Filed the co-claim intent at eight this morning."
"Then it's handled."
"It's a shipwreck, Torren."
"I'm aware what's nineteen miles off Key West. It's not a golf course."
Cade looked at me for a while.
I've known him eleven years. He's never once filled a silence out of discomfort. It's the single most annoying thing about him and it's also why the club is still standing.
"The parent entity behind the claim," he said, "traces back to the same foundation that funded Marchand in Louisiana."
I didn't say anything.
"The Gallery's going into the water," Cade said. "That's new. That's a whole new room in the house, and I'd like to know how big it is."
"Send Reyes."
"Reyes has forty logged dives and thirty-eight of those were in a quarry."
"Send anyone."
"There isn't anyone. That's the whole conversation. There is one man in this club who can work a debris field at ninety feet and get back on the boat, and he's standing under a Shovelhead pretending the ceiling's interesting."
I looked back down at the bike.
"No," I said.
"Okay."
He picked his printout up off the fender and walked away.
That's his move. He doesn't push. He puts the thing down and leaves it in the room with you and lets it get heavier, and by lunch it weighs four hundred pounds and you carry it to him yourself.
I lasted until eleven-fifteen.
Mama Odette caught me in the kitchen doorway, which is not a coincidence, because nothing in that kitchen has ever been a coincidence.
She had a plate in her hand before I'd fully entered the room.
"Sit."
"I'm not hungry."
"I didn't ask your stomach, I asked your legs." She put the plate down. Cuban bread, ham, mustard, the cheese she pretends she doesn't buy specially. "Sit down, Torren Vale."
I sat.
She let me get three bites in. She's tactical.
"He asked you," she said.
"He asked me."
"You said no."
"I said no."
"Mm." She wiped the counter that was already clean. "You know what I think."
"You're going to tell me either way, so I might as well eat while you do."
"Don't get smart, you're not equipped."
"That's fair."
She turned around and leaned back against the counter and folded her arms, and this is the part where she stops being funny, and she is never funnier than right before she stops being funny.
"Two years," she said, "I have watched you fix things."
"That's my job."
"That is not your job, baby, that is your hiding place, and it's a good one, because it looks like work." She tipped her chin at me. "Boy died. That is a terrible thing that happened. It is not a thing you did."
"I had the line."
"You had the line."
"He turned and then he stopped and I had the line in my hand and I felt it and I still needed forty seconds to get in the water."
"And in those forty seconds you got a tank on your back.
Which is the thing that let you bring him up instead of stay down there with him.
" She said it flatly, like a weather report.
"You want to be angry at forty seconds. Be angry.
But don't you dare tell me you were slow, because I've read the report, and so has everybody in this house, and every one of us has done the arithmetic and come out the same place. "
"That doesn't help."
"No," she agreed. "It usually doesn't. Eat your sandwich."
I ate my sandwich.
"Can I tell you the thing I actually think," she said, "or would you like to keep chewing at me."
"You're going to tell me."
"I am. But I'd like you to say yes first, because there's a difference, and you've had two years of people deciding things at you."
I put the sandwich down.
"Yes," I said.
"You think you're protecting them," Mama Odette said. "Every man in that garage. You think that if you never get in the water again then nobody ever has to hold a line for you and nobody ever has to find out what you found out." She raised her eyebrows. "How'd I do?"
I didn't answer.
"Mm," she said. "That's what I thought. It's a beautiful idea, baby, and it is the most selfish thing in this building, and I include the dog."
"Ghost is very selfish."
"Ghost is a dog. You're a grown man. It's different and you know it's different.
" She turned around and started wiping the same clean counter again.
"You put a wall around yourself and you tell yourself it's a fence around them.
Nobody's fooled. Cade's not fooled, Amos isn't fooled, and I have been feeding grieving men in this kitchen since before you could ride. "
"How many?"
She stopped wiping.
"Nine," she said.
I hadn't expected a number.
"Nine," she said again. "Some of them came back and some of them didn't, and I'm not going to tell you which was which, because you'd try to figure out which one you are, and that's not how it works.
It's not a category, Torren. It's a Tuesday.
You get up and you do the thing or you get up and you don't, and then it's Wednesday. "
She let a whole minute go by. Outside, somebody dropped something metal and swore.
"There's a woman down there," she said, "with two boats and a dead daddy and a crew of two, and somebody just walked into her house and took the only thing she had. And she called us. Out of everybody in this country, she called Arizona."
"And she needs a diver."
"She needs a witness," Mama Odette said. "The diving is just how you get there."
Church was short.
Cade laid it out for the table: the claim, the filing date, the trace back through the shells, the Louisiana overlap.
Reyes asked about jurisdiction. Amos asked about money.
Somebody asked whether we even wanted a maritime file open, given everything, and Cade said that we didn't get to want it, because the Gallery had already opened it and the only question was whether we were in the room.
Nobody looked at me. That took effort from about nine people.
At the end Cade said, "Motion to fund the Kwon co-claim and put a man on-site."
It carried.
Then he said, "Torren."
Everyone kept not looking at me, harder.
"You've all had two years of not asking," I said, to the table. "You can look up."
They looked up.
Which was, honestly, worse, and also the only decent thing available.
"I'll go," I said.
Cade nodded once, no ceremony, which I appreciated more than anything he could have said.
"One condition," I said.
"Name it."
"If I get in the water and I can't work, I'm on the next flight and nobody in this room ever says a word about it. Not a joke, not a look, not a hey brother. It never happened."
The table was quiet.
"That's the condition," I said.
"Agreed," Cade said. "Anybody objects?"
Nobody objected.
Amos said, "Four letters. Sea dog."
"Amos," said Cade.
"Salt," Amos said. "It's salt. Why does nobody in this club believe me about salt."
Cade walked me out to the lot.
The heat came up off the asphalt in that way that makes the mountains look like they're underwater, which was a thought I had and immediately put down like a hot pan.
"She know I haven't been under in two years?" I said.
"No."
"You going to tell her?"
"That's not my business. It's yours." He handed me a folder. "Charter's booked out of Phoenix Thursday morning. Bike stays here."
"I could ride it."
"It's thirty-one hours to Key West."
"I've got thirty-one hours."
"You've got a Thursday," Cade said. "Fly."
I looked at the folder. There was a photograph clipped inside — a boat, seen from a dock, rust weeping down under the cleats and a name I couldn't read at that resolution, and a woman on the foredeck caught mid-argument with somebody out of frame.
Sunglasses up in her hair. One hand doing something emphatic.
"What's she like?" I said.
"Talks a lot."
"Great."
"Talks a lot and knows what she's talking about," Cade said. "That's rarer than the other kind."
I put the folder under my arm.
"Torren." He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at the mountains doing their underwater thing.
"There's no version of this where you owe me a dive.
If you get down there and you sit on the deck the whole month and lawyer them to death from a lawn chair, that's a win.
I want that clear before you're four thousand miles away deciding what I meant. "
"You're a bad liar for a man who runs a club."
"I'm an excellent liar," Cade said. "I'm just not doing it right now."
Thursday. Miami to Key West on a plane the size of a decent van, and then a rental car south down a road that is mostly bridge, water on both sides of you for ninety minutes, flat and turquoise and shallow enough that you can see the bottom the whole way.
Everybody else on that road looks at the water and feels better.
I drove it with the radio off, counting mile markers down, and every one of them was a foot.
Ninety.
Eighty-nine.
The marina on Stock Island was a working yard, which I liked immediately — nets, drums, a forklift with a bad tire, three men arguing about a transmission in two languages, and gulls with the confidence of shareholders.
Slip fourteen. Two boats. The bigger one had HALCYON on the transom in paint that had given up sometime around the second Bush administration.
A tall kid was on the dock coiling a hose wrong.
"Torren Vale," I said.
He looked up at me. Then he looked further up at me, which people do, and then he looked past me for the rest of us, which people also do.
"You're — okay," he said. "Where's your motorcycle."
"Arizona."
"You didn't bring it?"
"It's thirty-one hours."
"So it's possible."
"It's possible."
"Ris!" he yelled, without turning his head. "The biker's here and he doesn't have a bike!"
A hatch banged, up forward.
And she came up out of it fast, wiping her hands down her shorts, sunburn across her nose and her hair shoved up under a cap and grease to the elbow, already talking before her feet were fully under her.
"Okay, first, we're behind, second, the compressor's fine, don't let Junho tell you the compressor's not fine, third — "
She stopped.
She looked at me for about a second and a half, top to bottom, with her head tilted slightly, the way you look at a piece of equipment somebody's dropped off that's much bigger than the space you cleared for it.
"Huh," said Nerissa Kwon.
"Ma'am."
"Oh, no," she said. "No, we're not doing ma'am. I've got forty-one thousand dollars of debt and a dead ship and a lawyer in Arizona I've never met, I don't have room for ma'am." She stuck her hand out. "Nerissa."
I took it. Her hand was small and hard and had a fresh cut across two knuckles that she hadn't dressed.
"Torren."
"Torren." She said it once more, quieter, like she was checking it for leaks.
Then she was moving again. "Okay. Boat. This is the Halcyon, she's a 1987 Delta, forty-eight feet, she's got a Detroit in her that my father rebuilt twice and I've rebuilt once, and there is a knock which is the injectors and which we are not discussing — "
"It's the injectors," said the kid.
"— which we are NOT discussing, Junho — and there's the Rosalind, the little one, thirty-two feet, she's laid up because I can't afford two insurance policies and a lie."
"You've got two boats and one policy."
"I've got two boats and one policy, and if you're about to say something about that, I'd like you to know that my father died owing forty-one thousand dollars and I have carried it for two years and eleven months and I am aware of every single thing that is wrong with this operation, in inventory, alphabetically. "
She stopped for air.
"Sorry," she said.
"Don't be."
"I'm not, actually. I just say it. It's punctuation."
At the stern, an old man on an overturned bucket kept splicing a line and did not look up, and I clocked him the way you clock the one person in a room who isn't performing.
"That's Pop," she said. "He's been on this boat longer than I've been a person."
"Sir."
"Don't call him sir, it goes to his head."
"It does," Pop agreed, to the line.
"You dive ninety?" she said.
Everything in me went very still and very quiet, the way it does.
"I've been to ninety," I said.
Which was true.
She nodded, satisfied, and turned away and started talking about tide windows, and behind her Junho said something about a girlfriend and a dolphin schedule, and from the stern an old man on a bucket looked up at me with an expression I didn't understand for another five weeks.
That was Thursday.