“Of course it was yellow, Chip,” I said.
“I don’t know about of course,” retorted Chip. “There are multiplayer games I do where mermaids have blue hair. Green. Even purple.”
“This wasn’t an MOG,” said Nancy, a little prudishly.
“So what did she do?” pressed Chip.
“Put out that cigarette!” said Nancy sharply, turning to the boat captain. “Please! I suffer from asthma!”
“Nancy?” I chimed in as the captain, looking resentful, flicked his cigarette over the side of the boat, thus littering. “So what did the mermaid do?”
“She swam away! She was quick. Really quick,” said Nancy. “I followed, but I was a lot slower. But I saw there were others like her. I saw their shapes in the water before they got away from me. A pod, if you can call it that. It was a pod of mer-people.”
“Well, if they swam away,” said Chip gently, “they may not be there when we get there. I want you to be prepared for that. We won’t judge you, Deb and I, if we can’t find them this time. You know—no judgment.”
“None at all,” I said. “I’m sure they don’t stay for long. Once they’ve been spotted. I mean, they must be secretive types, right? Or people would have known about them long ago.”
“We do know about them,” said Nancy.
“But I mean, know they were real,” I said.
“Colossal squid,” said Nancy.
“Pardon?”
“Well, they were ‘mythic’ too, till recently. Then their bodies were found, dead and floating. Finally one was caught live. Forty feet long. Weighed one thousand pounds. The oceans are very deep, you know. The last frontier. Still largely unexplored. New discoveries happen daily, new species are identified all the time. Maybe this is a similar situation.”
There was no reasoning with a deranged marine biologist. I nodded agreeably.
Before long the captain was throttling down and Nancy was eagerly pulling on her fins, positioning her mask.
“Come on, come on!” she urged, as Chip and I struggled with our own masks and fins. And then we followed her off the side of the boat, which had a slide built into it. Swoop and splash.
I have to say it was gorgeous down there, a place where beauty clichés came true. Light filtering, colorful blobby formations, glamorously decorated fish flitting about—all in all it was exactly what you’d hope it would be. Chip and I followed Nancy, waving our flippers steadily. She turned out to be much better at the free-dive thing than either of us; Chip had to be impressed.
Again and again she dove, fishlike. Or seabird-like, possibly.
Chip tried to copy her after her first few dives, when she turned her goggly, tube-sucking face toward us and made a gesture of impatience. Seemed like she didn’t know what we were up to, snorkeling around on the surface, wimpy. I could tell Chip felt he had to rise, or rather dip, to the challenge. Chip’s fit but he’s no scuba diver; I hoped he wouldn’t get the bends. I didn’t even try to dive deep, myself—I had a mild case of swimmer’s ear. So I floated, waggling my flippers as Chip did his best, coming up to breathe through his tube, then dipping down again and again in the parrotfish expert’s wake.
The airplane was maybe twenty feet under. You couldn’t even see into its decrepit cockpit from up at the surface, where I was. But no yellow-haired mer-people must have been languishing there, because Chip shook his head when he got back up to me. He stuck his head out for air, then came back under and gave me a slow-motion headshake.
But Nancy didn’t give up easily. She kept on going, round and round the reef, to each new nook and cranny, then out past the reef to a cluster of underwater rocks. The variety of fishes thinned out and there were fewer of the bright, darting ones and more of the flattish, dull-colored numbers camouflaged by sand. I was waiting to signal to Chip that I was heading back to the boat—I thought I’d get a drink of water, take off the borrowed wetsuit and put my feet up for a while—when down beneath me, where he and Nancy had most recently dived, came a silvery explosion of bubbles, a confusion of flippers. Streams of froth surged up and made it impossible to see anything but white.
I hoped they hadn’t met with a jellyfish or been barracuda-bit. As I peered down and saw nothing, I ideated blood and teeth, severed digits bobbing and leaking crimson in the surf, like in so many shark movies. I started to feel panicky as the cloud of bubbles in the water beneath me refused to clear, and finally decided to free-dive down—my swimmer’s ear be damned. What if Chip was caught on something and running out of air? What if the crazed biologist had suddenly attacked him? There could be anything happening, below that blinding screen of turbulence.
I gulped air from my tube, held it, and gave what I hoped was a powerful flip of my fins. Down I bucked, feeling pressure inside my head and not liking it a bit. I swished myself around the bubble cloud, instead of through the midst of it, so that I wouldn’t crash into anyone coming up; I tried to force myself down, though my body resisted. Still I could see nothing except a rock with brown and yellow barnacle-type things on it that looked like rotting teeth. I bobbed up again, gasping.
Luckily, a few seconds later Chip surfaced too, and then Nancy, all of us popping our tubes out and sucking in air.
“Jesus!” cried Chip, spluttering.
“You saw them! Didn’t you?” asked Nancy, spluttering too.
“I gotta go down again,” said Chip, and without waiting for me to answer, down he dove.
I followed him, of course, because at this point curiosity was killing me. It was frustrating, though, because I was in Chip’s bubble trail again. There are negatives to being a follower instead of a leader, in a diving situation.
