Benchley, Peter (3 page)

“What is it?”

“Medicine, I guess. It looks like the ends were meant to be broken off so a syringe could be stuck in to draw off the liquid.”

“I wonder if it’s still good.”

“Should be. It’s airtight, God knows.”

Sanders looked over the stern. “Tomorrow let’s bring a bag. I think there’s a lot more stuff down there.”

When they reached the beach, the lifeguard-blond, deeply tanned, wearing a white T-shirt with a red cross on the backwas waiting for them in hip-deep water. He grabbed the bow, eased the boat up onto the sand, and helped them unload their gear. “See you got some goodies,” he said to Gail as he watched her pile their finds on a towel and twist the ends of the towel together, fashioning a sack.

“Some,” Sanders answered. The lifeguard had annoyed him at their first meeting that morning, when Sanders had rented the Whaler from him. He was cocky and young, and Sanders was sure he was closer to Gail’s twenty-six years than to his own thirty-seven.

And when the lifeguard spoke-even in answer to a question asked by Sanders-he looked at Gail. Sanders was convinced that the lifeguard was more interested in the sway of Gail’s breasts as she bent over than in any relics they had brought from the wreck.

Sensing Sanders” pique, the lifeguard said to him, “You find any shells?”

“Shells?”

“Artillery shells. Depth charges. You know.

Explosives.”

“Live explosives?”

“I’ve always heard

Goliath

had a bunch of munitions on board. Maybe it’s all talk.”

Sanders said, “We’ll look tomorrow. We’d like to use the boat again.”

“Sure, as long as the wind doesn’t go around to the south and start blowing. You don’t want to be on that reef in a strong south wind.”

“No. Neither did

Goliath.”

Carrying their gear, Gail and David trudged up the beach. The sand was pink-tinted by millions of tiny hard-shelled sea animals, called Foraminifera-and so fine that walking in it was like shuffling through talc.

By the time they reached the base of the cliff, Sanders was sweating. His palms were wet, and he had difficulty holding the necks of the scuba tanks. He looked up at the cliff, one hundred feet of sheer coral and limestone. To the right was a narrow, twisting staircase that led to the top. To the left was an elevator-a four-foot-square cage that rode up and down on a steel pole embedded in a concrete base-installed decades earlier in a crevasse cut in the cliff.

On a control panel in the cage there were two buttons, marked “up” and “down.” If the elevator malfunctioned, there was no alarm bell, no emergency button: the passengers (three, at most) had no choice but to wait until someone spotted them and called for help. At breakfast the Sanderses had been told a story about an elderly couple who were trapped in the elevator as they rode up from the beach at twilight. They were the last to leave the beach, so there was no one below to see them. During the night, the wind swung around to the southwest and freshened into a moderate gale. The pole quivered in the wind, shaking the cage and the couple within, like a pocketful of loose change.

When in the morning they were finally found, the woman (so went the story) was dead from fright and ex-posure, and the man had gone mad. He babbled to his rescuers about devils who had called to him in the darkness, about birds that had tried to peck out his eyes.

On their way down to the beach, Gail had refused to ride in the elevator. “I get

claustrophobia in office-building elevators,”

she had said. “I’d be a basket case before I reached the bottom in that thing.”

Sanders had not argued, but he insisted on sending their air tanks down in the elevator, for, as he pointed out, “If we let one of them bong into the rocks and rupture, we’ll go up like a Roman candle.”

Now he had no intention of walking up the staircase. He turned left, toward the elevator. Gail turned right.

“You’re not going to walk up those stairs,” he said.

“I sure am. What about you? I thought you were afraid of heights.”

“I’m not

afraid

of heights, any more than I’m

afraid

of airplanes. I don’t like either one, but I’m not about to let them ruin my life.”

“Well, I’m still not getting in that bird cage.

Come on. It’s good for your legs.”

Sanders shook his head. “I’ll see you up there.”

He loaded the gear into the elevator, closed the gate, and pushed the “up” button. There was a click, then the motor whirred, whined, and lifted the cage off the ground. Sanders stood facing the cliff, staring at the gray rock as it moved slowly by.

When he had seen enough of the cliff, he turned around and faced the sea, forcing himself to look down. He saw the lifeguard wheeling the Whaler up the beach on a light dolly, and a couple lying on colored beach H

towels arranged next to each other in perfect symmetry-looking, as they receded, like a postage stamp stuck to the pink sand.

His mind barely registered the change in the pitch of the electric motor, rising from a whine to a complaint.

When the cage bucked once, then stopped, he was not afraid; he assumed that someone, somewhere, had pushed a “stop” button, and soon that same someone would push a “g” button. He waited.

The motor was still racing, like an automobile engine in neutral with the accelerator pushed to the floor.

Sanders pressed the “down” button. There was a click, but no change in the sound. He pushed the “up” button. Another click. The elevator did not move. He looked up. There was no roof to the cage, and he could see the top of the cliff, perhaps fifteen feet away.

When Gail got to the top of the stairs, she was breathing hard, and her thighs ached. She walked along the path for a few yards and was surprised to see that the elevator wasn’t there. Her first thought made her smile: David chickened out and was following her up the stairs. She returned to the staircase and looked down; it was empty. Her next thought made beads of sweat break out on her forehead. She ran to where the elevator should have been and, supporting herself on a guardrail, leaned over the edge of the cliff.

She was relieved: the cage was still there-at least it hadn’t pulled away from the pole and crashed to the bottom. Sanders had reached his hands through the bars in the cage and was gripping the pole.

“Are you all right?” she called.

“It just stopped.”

Gail looked at the machinery by the top of the elevator shaft. Two steel arms extended from concrete bases and encircled the pole. There was a large metal box, containing, she presumed, the motor. But there were no obvious controls, no buttons. “Don’t move!” she said. “I’ll get help.”

She ran into the lobby of the Orange Grove Club, ignoring sternly worded signs prohibiting “bathing costumes and bare feet” in the public rooms of the club.

“The elevator’s stuck!” she shouted as she approached the front desk. “My husband’s caught inside.”

The elderly clerk at the front desk was dressed in a morning coat, and he seemed more concerned about Gail’s lack of clothing than about her alarm. All he said was “Yes.”

“The elevator’s stuck! My husband’s-was “Yes,” the clerk said again. He picked up a telephone and dialed one digit.

“Well,

do

something!” Gail said.

“I am, madam.” He spoke into the phone.

“Clarence? It’s happened again,” he said, with a teasing I-told-you-so tone. He hung up and said to Gail, “Help will be along presently.”

“What do you mean, “presently”?”

“Madam,” the clerk said stiffly, “if you’d care to wait on the veranda …” He cast a disapproving eye on Gail’s bare midriff.

As soon as Gail was outside, she started to run, and then she saw Sanders, waiting for her at the top of the cliff, a

grin on his face. Gail ran to him, put her arms around him, and kissed him.

“I was so worried … ,” she said. “How did you make it work?”

“Make what work? I shinnied up the pole.”

“You did

what?”

“Shinnied. You know … shinnied.”

Unbelieving, Gail looked over the edge of the cliff. The elevator was where it had been, their diving gear still in

side.

“Why?”

“I’d never done it before.”

She looked at him and felt a sudden rush of anger. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“Don’t be silly. It was a calculated risk.

I thought I could do it, and I did.”

“What if you’d been wrong.”

“Yeah, well, those are the chances you take.” He noticed the fury in her face. “C’mon, everything’s …” He saw her hand coming at him, and he ducked. Her fist grazed the top of his head.

“For Christ sake!” he said, raising his arm to ward off the second blow. He grabbed her, pinned her arms to her sides, and brought her to him. “Hey . .

. nobody got hurt.”

She struggled briefly, then stood still and let him hold her. “Who are you trying to impress?” she said.

As he started to answer, Sanders heard footsteps behind him. He turned to see an old black man carrying a ring of keys. The man was muttering.

“What went wrong?” Sanders asked.

“Temp’amental like a baby.” The man searched for the key to open the metal box.

“Does this happen often?”

The man didn’t answer. He opened the box, reached inside, and nicked a switch. Immediately, the pitch of the motor dropped back to normal. The man pushed something else, and, after a couple of clicks, wheels began to turn. Within seconds, the elevator was at the top of the cliff. The man shut the door, turned the key in the lock, and started away.

“Hey,” Sanders said. “What happened?”

“Never know. Maybe too hot, maybe too cold.”

“It’s not going to fall off the pole, is it?”

“Never happen. If something ain’t just right, there’s clamps that suck right down on that pole like a old octopus. No, all that ever happen is she get stuck. If people just be patient, they be okay.”

When the man had left, Sanders unloaded the diving gear. “Give me a hand with this?” he said to Gail.

She didn’t move. She looked at him and said flatly, “Don’t you ever do something like that again.”

Sanders stepped out of the shower, dried himself, and stood before the bathroom mirror. He tightened his pectoral and stomach muscles and was pleased to see the muscle fibers showing through the skin. He patted his stomach and smiled.

The bathroom door opened behind him, and he felt a cool breeze that carried the aroma of Gail.

Gently, Gail pinched the insignificant flesh that sat above his hipbones. “Don’t exercise too much,” she said. “I’d hate it if you lost your love handles.”

“Never.” Sanders turned and kissed her.

They dressed for dinner, and as they left the cottage, Sanders slammed the door, turned the key in the lock, and jiggled the doorknob to make sure the lock was fast.

“Who’s going to steal anything?” Gail asked.

“Anybody. Cameras, diving gear-it’s expensive stuff. No point in making it easy to get at.”

“Well, locking the door won’t do any good. The maid has a key.”

Holding hands, they walked along the path to the main building of the Orange Grove Club. It was like walking through a tropical nursery. Oleander, hibiscus, bougainvillaea, poinciana, and poinsettia, in a fusion of colors, crowded the sides of the path. Oranges and lemons dropped from trees in small well-tended groves. They passed a cluster of cottages similar to their own.

The limestone buildings were painted orange-all but the roofs, which shone soft white in the evening sunlight.

Gail said, “Have you ever seen cleaner roofs?”

“They’d better be clean. That’s what you drink off of.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no well water on Bermuda, no underground streams, no rivers, no nothing. All the water comes from rain. It runs off the roofs into cisterns.”

“I thought you said it never rains here.”

“What I said was, there’s never been a year with less than three hundred and forty days of some

sunshine. It rains a fair amount, even in summer. But the storms are sudden and squally, and they don’t last long.”

“For someone who’s never been here, you’re full of groovy facts.”

“National Geographic

training,” Sanders said. “Life is nothing but the pursuit and capture of the elusive fact.”

“Why did you quit the

Geographic?

Writing for them sounds like it’d be fun.”

“Writing

might have been.” Sanders smiled.

“Doing

anything might have been. I didn’t do, and I didn’t write. I only made up captions.

Legends, they call them. I went there because I wanted to live with wild apes, fight with crocodiles, and dive for wrecks no man had ever seen. Instead, I spent my days thinking up lines like, “Calcutta: In-Spot for India’s Teeming Millions.” I never

did

anything. I was paid to abbreviate what other people did.”

As they neared the club’s main building, another couple, younger, appeared on the path, walking toward them. Their gaits were awkward, for they had their arms around each other’s waists, and since the man was much taller than his bride, he had to shorten his steps into a mincing trot so she could keep up with him. As soon as he saw the young couple, Sanders dropped Gail’s hand.

When the couple had passed, Gail said, “Why did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Drop my hand.”

Sanders blushed. “Honeymooners make me nervous.”

She took his arm and touched his shoulder with her head.

“You’re one, too, you know.”

“Yeah. But I’ve already had one honeymoon.”

“It’s my first, though,” Gail said. “Let me enjoy it.”

They passed through the lobby-large, sedate, paneled in gleaming, close-grained cedar-and walked by the bil-Hard room, game room, card room, reading room, and bar on their way to the outdoor patio overlooking the ocean. They were shown to a table at the edge of the patio. The sun, setting behind them, lit the clouds on the horizon and made them glow bright pink.

A waiter came to take their drink order. He was young, black, and there was a name on the tag on his breast pocket. He spoke in monosyllables and addressed them both-not disrespectfully-as “man.”