The Expert

“The moment of truth, Rusty,” Wade Embry says, “comes when the matador faces the greatest danger and plunges his sword over the horns and into the bull’s heart.” To demonstrate, he lunges toward me across the deck of the sleek white cruiser with an imaginary sword as a yellow and black-winged butterfly flits past on the breeze.

I know Wade fenced in college, but he just doesn’t seem that deadly to me.

When I don’t react, he asks my wife if she’s ever read The Sun Also Rises.

“In high school, but that was a long time ago,” Paige says.

“Not that long,” he tells her.

A faint blush highlights her cheeks as she tossed her russet curls, smiles, sits up a little straighter on the gunwale, and I realize the son-of-a-bitch is flirting with my wife. Paige’s new best friend, June, notices and gives him a piercing stare. We’re on the stern beside the gnarled dock in Key Largo waiting for the last three equipment-laden tourists to straggle aboard. Low clouds on the horizon hint at possible rain, but under this blazing tropical sun it seems improbable that anything can ruin such a day.

Unless it’s Wade, who’s now leaning on the starboard rail, squinting in the glare coming off the rolling blue-green Gulf, flexing his muscles, the dumbass. Who does he think he is—Ernest Hemingway? He doesn’t seem afraid. But he should be because he lacks the proper training for this. I’m afraid he’ll pose a danger to all of us underwater.

He’s talking about Hemingway, I believe, because he’s obsessed with machismo. Also, because we’ve been to Key West. I’ve been telling him how I spent the last six-weeks getting ready for this trip by studying Boyle’s Law and Archimedes’ Principle and sitting on the bottom of a pool turning the air in my tank off and on.

At the dive shop, it wasn’t the mermaid posters promising “wet dreams” and “divers do it deeper” that got my attention, but a faded canvas diving rig like Captain Nemo’s equipped with black rubber hoses and coarse brown rope, threaded into a huge riveted windowed copper helmet bristling with wingnuts, joints, hinges, and valves. “I see you’ve met Jacques, one of our elder instructors,” the shopkeeper had said.

I felt Jacques was beckoning me toward underwater adventure.

*

“Rusty, all this training and risk-taking and passion sounds like someone bent on becoming an aficionado. Are you?” Wade asked.

I was standing on the balcony of Hemingway’s New Orleans-style home, which is surrounded by abundant plantings and a rough brick wall. Hemingway and a pal built the wall back in the Thirties to keep curiosity-seekers away. Now the place was still teeming with tourists like us. Of course, the bigger question was why were we down here with these people?

The answer seemed obvious. Otherwise, Paige would not have come. She had no interest in scuba diving and even less in Hemingway, whom she considered a philandering braggart and bully. She just wanted to go shopping with June Embry. Or savor the purple and white bougainvillea, palms, and Gumbo Limbos. Or walk around the metal-roofed Bahamian-style houses whose porches sometimes had purple planks, pink walls, sky blue ceilings.

We had moved into the master bedroom, where one of Hemingway’s famed six-toed cats lay curled up on a pillow, and I overheard a tour guide saying the cats now had computer chips implanted to foil would-be thieves. When Wade began sharing his knowledge of that technology, I slipped off to Hemingway’s study over the pool house, where many of his most famous stories and books were said to have been written on an old portable typewriter that’s still there. I imagined him standing at the wide windowsills where he might have placed the typewriter when terrible back trouble drove him to write standing up. I wanted to touch the keys and feel the magic. I wondered if the old man had ever written any diving stories. I didn’t think so at first, but then one came to me. In “After the Storm,” Hemingway’s hero makes multiple dives trying to get treasure out of a wreck off the Keys, breaking every rule in the book, beginning with diving alone.

*

Paige and June and I are sitting under a canopy, admiring the circling gulls and gliding pelicans, as we begin the seven-mile run out to the reef, where the diving starts and the talking stops. Paige is wearing a yellow sundress with a striped beach towel wrapped around her head. Dark sunglasses perch on her nose and when I slide closer, she smells like Coppertone and squeezed limes.

“You’re a lucky man, Rusty,” Wade murmurs, and smiles at my wife.

“You’d better believe it, buddy,” Paige grins back at him.

Bastard.

The dive boat slowly winds through mangrove-covered shoals and finger channels, where the captain, who stands at the wheel in nothing but his shades and Speedos, says small game fish may be found.

“Where’s the best diving you’ve ever seen?” I ask.

“In twenty-six years of diving all over the world, I’ve never found any better than right here when conditions are right.”

“Did you hear that?” I ask Wade, who strokes his Vandyke.

“Unfortunately, conditions today are nothing to write home about. Visibility is only twenty to thirty feet.”

“If that’s bad, what’s good?”

“Forty or fifty, so you can see all the way to the bottom,” the captain says.

We emerge from the channel mouth, and the boat rears up and starts slicing through the waves, unspooling foam in our wake.

*

Back in that famous bar on Duval Street, where there is still Cuban tile work and jalousie doors, I noticed yellowed press clippings and framed photographs of Hemingway up on the wall. In one dusty memento, the thirty-something novelist stood holding a fishing pole.

            “Hemingway drank gimlets,” I said. “You should drink gimlets in Sloppy Joe’s.”

But Wade insisted on ordering a bottle of Beaujolais. He poured it into his glass, swirled and sniffed, and held it up to the light that glittered on the rim and wine trails.

“Thicker legs mean higher alcoholic content,” he said, smiling again at Paige.

By now, I wanted to strangle him with my bare hands. The more Wade drank, the more erudite he became about the thin-skinned, low-tannin Gamay grape.

“Must you go on and on?” June said.

“I’m not going on and on.”

“Well, whatever it is you’re doing, I wish you’d stop.” June turned to me. “Scuba diving makes me imagine being either terrified or supremely confident, Rusty. Which are you?”

“Hell, June, if you’re that impressed, maybe I ought to go diving with him,” Wade said.

I looked at him. “Are you serious? You can’t buy air unless you’re certified, even in the Keys.” 

“A guy down at the docks today told me I could get certified in an hour.”

“Don’t be a fool, Wade,” June said. “You could drown.”

Wade let out a huge sigh. “Sometimes, a man just outgrows a relationship.”

“You mean the same way a woman outgrows a man?” June looked away. “Maybe you’ve

had enough.”

“I’ll let you know when I’ve had enough.”

*

“If Hemingway were a fish,” I say, over the roar of the engine and the surf, “what kind of fish would he be?”

“A trout,” Wade says. “Hemingway loved fly fishing.”

“A dolphin,” Paige says.

“Why a dolphin?” I ask.

“Because they’re almost human.”

“Well,” June says in her deep south accent, “I say a great sperm whale, for obvious reasons. What about you, Rusty?”

“Probably a battered marlin with fourteen hooks in his mouth,” I say, thinking of Hemingway’s many close brushes with death.

“Hemingway, Shmemingway,” June says. “What about Jaws? What about sharks?”

“The sharks who rip apart Santiago’s big fish in The Old Man and The Sea are considered by some a metaphor for Hemingway’s critics,” Wade says.

 “Molasses Reef,” the captain says, cutting the engine ten minutes later. “Gear up.”

Paige and June are going snorkeling while we dive. The captain throws a rope over the stern for them to hang onto.

“Y’all are going to have a great time,” I say, strapping on my weight belt, Buoyancy Compensator, and tank.

“You be careful down there, Rusty,” Paige says, giving me a hug.

“Why are you rubbing Vaseline over your moustache?” Wade asks.

“Seals the mask.”

“Can I have some?”

I hand him the little plastic container.

“Remember to keep the regulator in your mouth at all times. Even if you feel sick underwater, don’t ever take it out or you’ll drown. You can do whatever you need to through it. Even vomit,” the captain says.

When we break up into buddy teams, Wade is with me.

“Stay close down there,” I tell him. “I’ll wait. We’ll go to the bottom together.”

“Stick with Rusty. He knows what he’s doing,” June advises.

“Oh, yes, follow the expert,” Wade smirks.

Others are ahead of me. I lean back and fall in. I wait for Wade, then lead him to the bottom. On the white sand, I look up. The boat’s hull seems far away. The anchor line is our only reassuring link to the surface. I flutter-kick to the reef and hang motionless in the slightly turbid water. Within seconds, I’m surrounded by shimmering, orange and blue fish who hold steady against the current until I reach out, and in a blink they’re gone.

We’ve been told to signal the captain that we’re okay every ten minutes. I do so faithfully even when caught up in wonder at the sight of tiny sea horses bouncing on invisible currents, and intricately patterned blue green fish darting through a forest of stag horn, elk, and brain coral. Black-striped yellowtails bolt through sea fans and plumes and whips. When my air gets low, I signal Wade that it’s time to go up. He shakes his head, so I try again more emphatically. He turns and swims away. You’re never supposed to leave a fellow diver. It’s a cardinal rule. But now he’s given me no choice but to surface.

“Where the hell’s your buddy?” the captain snaps.

When I try to explain what Wade has done, he cuts me off. “I don’t care. Get your ass back down there and find him. Don’t come back without him.”

I descend once more and search for Wade. Camouflaged by the sandy bottom, a huge ray explodes out from under me and flaps off. I swim anxiously around the reef, looking in every direction for Wade. I’m about to give up when he finds me. He’s breathing rapidly—a sure sign of panic. He points to his tank as his air runs out.

He wants mine.

I can share—or let him drown. My choice, and after all he’s pulled, I’m tempted. But you can’t do that. After several quick deep breaths, I take the regulator out of my mouth and hand it over. He grabs it and sucks air desperately, unleashing torrents of effervescence. When I signal that it’s my turn for air, he won’t give it back.

I’ve been taught that panic is the leading cause of drowning. So, I try to relax. Wade’s not going off anywhere without me, not with the regulator hose attached to my tank. I could try to wrest it away from him, but he might drown us both. I am weighing my options when Wade uses up the last breath of air. Only one thing to do now. I grab him and unbuckle his weight belt. As it drops, I pop his CO2 cartridge, inflating his B.C. The sudden change in buoyancy rips the regulator out of Wade’s mouth as he shoots upward.

I make a manual emergency ascent, flutter kicking. To keep from getting the bends and dying a horrible death, I force myself to exhale slowly until my lungs feel completely empty. But there’s always a little air left, according to my diving instructor. The pressure outside your body lessens as you rise, while the air inside expands to fill your lungs. I hope Wade has remembered to exhale slowly, assuming he was taught to during his one-hour crash course.

As I cork up fighting for breath, the captain is fishing Wade out.

“You son-of-a-bitch,” I scream at Wade. “Were you trying to drown me?”

He doesn’t reply—probably can’t.

With the wind kicking up and the boat rolling, climbing the stern ladder on my own is tricky. As I sink exhausted against a gunwale, Wade is flopping around the deck like a gaffed tuna with June and Paige anxiously hovering over him.

“Wade, are you okay?” June says.

“What’s wrong with him?” Paige says.

The captain puts the dive boat in gear and turns back toward shore. “What the hell happened down there?” he asks.

“A moment of indecision,” I reply.  

But I doubt if he can hear me over the engine noise.

© 2024 Rick Neumayer

First published in 2012 in The Tulane Review, “The Expert” and will appear in the forthcoming THREE FOGGY MORNINGS: Collected Short Stories by Rick Neumayer. If you like the story, I’d love to hear from you.