Like climbers reaching the top of a cliff from below, they
reached the hull and began moving across. They were within ten
feet of Gimbel's Hole when Dan saw him. He waved Barker
over. Charlie's face was pressed into the rotting sheets of steel
that had once supported the Promenade Deck. He was motionless,
and he did not respond. The dive light attached to his dry
suit continued to emit a beam, wan in the dwindling visibility
now. Plankton gathered at the illumination, spinning in the light.
Charlie was wedged somehow in the wreck. His regulator was
out of his mouth. Dan dropped down to Charlie's left and Barker
to his right and they spent a few moments looking at him.
Charlie was so close to Gimbel's Hole, where other divers had
been. Why hadn't anyone seen him? The answer had a few parts
to it. Charlie had come to rest at a spot that placed him behind
divers who would have exited Gimbel's Hole and proceeded to
the Seeker's anchor line. Divers often created their own silt clouds
as they moved around on the wreck. The silt created small, diversized
zones of poor visibility even on a day when the overall visibility
was good. Finally, they weren't looking for him.
"Dan drank more that night than he had in ten years."
Dan and Barker saw that Charlie's decompression stage bottles
had not been deployed, which suggested that Charlie, for
some reason, had fallen down from somewhere in the water
above to this spot. His manifold valve, which allowed breathing
gases to be drawn down from both tanks,was in the correct ON
position. Dan pushed a button on Charlie's buoyancy compensator,
in an effort to get some lift on Charlie.The device's inflatable
wings filled with air, but Charlie's body didn't budge.
Then they saw that his feet were stuck under something on
the wreck, and they freed him. Barker then unclipped Charlie's
twenty-eight-pound weight belt and Charlie's body began to
drift upward. As they watched, he continued to rise until after
about twenty feet he ascended into the blackness, the flame of
his dive light erased by the gloom.
Charlie hit the surface close to the Seeker. Kane, Carpenter,
and Trent jumped into the water and towed him closer to the
boat. Kane saw that Charlie's lips were blue. Someone else felt
for a pulse and there was none, so this time no one performed
CPR. The Coast Guard had already told Dan's crew that it
would only take Charlie back on the rescue helicopter if he was
alive. So the helicopter was waved off, just before 2 P.M.
Coast Guard authorities in Boston typed a press release
about their involvement in the case. It noted that Charlie was
the fifth diver in two summers to be lost at the wreck site.The
public affairs staff in Boston faxed the statement to dozens of
newspapers in the Northeast. It was the first time the agency
had mentioned that a death--Chris Murley's--had taken place
a week earlier.
An hour later, with Charlie's rigid body aboard, the Seeker
made for Montauk.The voyage was bouncy. Swells had built to
three feet, and seawater scribbled the cabin windows.The divers
were quiet. Dan said little; this time, he knew the widow. He
would tell people Charlie had been family, and it was easy to
understand why. He was part of the little community from
which the Seeker drew its crew and many of its customers, one
of the divers who lived in the string of small towns squeezed
between the Garden State Parkway and the Jersey shore. Charlie
had been his diving student, munching on the Dunkin' Donuts
laid out on the bar in the den.
The Seeker entered Montauk Inlet about 11 that night.The
crew stopped at the Coast Guard station on Star Island, handed
over Charlie's body, then motored over to the Star Island Yacht
Club. At least one newspaper photographer snapped photographs
as the men unloaded their gear. The tanks clinked
together and thunked on the timbers of the dock. The men
wore old gym shorts and dirty T-shirts; their faces had two or
three days' growth.
Later, Dan and the crew ended up over at the Liar's Saloon.
It's a cheap small place where Montauk's commercial fishermen
and marina workers go late at night. Tourists favor the big
restaurants farther out on Westlake Road, places that bought
lobster traps and buoys from fishermen's supply stores and
tacked them up to their walls for decoration.The effect was supposed
to be the way it was in Montauk, thirty years back and
more, when men from Queens and Brooklyn would take the
"Fishermen's Special" train to the party boats lined up like feeding
cattle at the piers of nearby Fort Pond Bay.
The Liar's Saloon had a simpler marketing strategy: DRAFT
BEER $1, said the red-lettered sign out by the road. The men
from the Seeker crunched across the gravel lot and past the
Ocean Spirit, a lobster boat under repair.
Inside, for hours, they hoisted draft beers, $1, and toasted
their dead friend Charlie. They sang along with some of the
Jimmy Buffett songs on the jukebox. They played foosball. It
was amusing to play foosball when you had drunk several draft
beers. The foosball scores were low.There had been a death in
the family.
Dan drank more that night than he had in ten years.
