Absolute Pressure Page 2

  If it wasn’t an accident, that left two questions. Who had wrecked the valve? And why?

  chapter five

  There were two places Judd could take me in the Keys for a recompression chamber. One was in the upper Keys. The other was owned by the US military, right in Key West.

  The military chamber was closer, and we were onshore in less than fifteen minutes.

  Judd had radioed ahead, and an ambulance was waiting for me. Along with Uncle Gord and the girl who handled phone calls and did bookkeeping for the dive shop part-time.

  Sherri Eaton.

  As Judd banged the boat into the rubber dock bumpers, Uncle Gord and Sherri jumped down to where I was laying with my head on a towel, still in my wet suit.

  Sherri Eaton was my age. Her mom was a neighbor of Uncle Gord’s, and she’d been hanging around his dive shop every summer since I’d first started visiting Key West when I was ten years old.

  As usual when Sherri was around, I hardly noticed Uncle Gord. First, she’s tall and she’s blond, and when she wears a swim suit, fire trucks and police cars could be racing each other in circles, and no one would notice anything except Sherri. And when she smiles, the sun has to take second place too.

  I know I’m not the only guy who stutters when she’s around.

  But I’m guessing there’s nobody else in the world who tastes blackberries when he sees her.

  Yes. Blackberries. Much as I didn’t like feeling like a freak, I guess there were some good things about synesthesia. She wasbeautiful, and I liked the taste of blackberries. It was a nice combination.

  Not that I’d ever let her know about it. I wanted her to like me, not run away from me.

  She leaned over, frowning with worry.

  I was just as worried, wondering when the pain would hit, wondering if I would die, but even with all that worry, my tongue sent the taste of blackberries to my brain. Just for a few seconds.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  Uncle Gord pushed her away. “What happened?”

  He made me feel like a kid. I’ve been a certified diver for years, but he was almost a legend around Key West. I wanted to apologize, even though I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Broken valve,” Judd answered for me. He pointed at the tank. “It’s amazing he made it to the surface.”

  “What?” Uncle Gord’s tanned face became a few shades darker. He’s my mother’s brother. They both had quicktempers. But they were also quick to laugh. I thought the world of both of them. “An emergency rise?”

  “Ninety-three feet,” Judd said.

  Sherri had moved in closer again. She touched my elbow as she knelt beside me. My left elbow. Bright red flooded my vision. When it went away a few seconds later, I saw that she was still beside me.

  “Ninety-three feet?” She frowned again. “Ian, tell me you’re okay.”

  I didn’t have time to answer. The ambulance crew was on the boat. With a stretcher to take me to the decompression chamber.

  “Sherri,” I said. My voice was a croak.

  She leaned in. Sherri always smelled faintly of coconut oil. It was my favorite smell. For a while I had wondered if that smell was part of synesthesia too. Like the taste of blackberries. Until I’d seen her use some from a bottle.

  “Ian?”

  I couldn’t imagine how nice it would have been if she would have leaned a little closer.

  I was thinking that I might die. That I might never have a chance to tell her how I really felt about her. How much I wished just once she’d lean close enough to hug me.

  “I really, really love blackberries,” I said. If I was going to die, I wanted her to know how much I liked her. But before I told her how much I liked her, I’d have to work up the courage to tell her about my synesthesia.

  “Ian?”

  “Blackberries. Because when you—”

  I couldn’t finish my sentence. Bubbles in my blood hit me so hard that I bit through my tongue. There was the copper taste of blood and the warmth of it on my lips as it spilled from my mouth.

  But that pain of my pierced tongue was nothing compared to getting hit by the bends.

  I put my mouth into the crook of my arm and muffled my scream.

  chapter six

  Divers call it “the bends.” They call it that because when you get it, you are forced to bend over with pain. It is a horrible pain. It hits the joints of elbows, shoulders and legs. If it’s bad enough, it can make you blind or kill you.

  Uncle Gord had explained the bends to me by telling me to think of a bottle of soda. Shake it hard and quickly open the cap. Watch it bubble over. Then think ofbubbles popping out of your blood in the same way. Major pain.

  It has to do with the same water pressure that squeezed the milk jug.

  You see, the normal air that you breathe every day has nitrogen in it, along with oxygen. Scuba diving tanks have the same mixture. As you breathe underwater, the pressure of the water’s weight on your body slowly forces the nitrogen gas into your blood. The longer you stay down, the more nitrogen is in your blood.

  It’s not a problem, as long as you make sure the nitrogen gas leaves just as slowly as it went in. Just like with a plastic bottle of soda. If you open the cap a little at a time, the pressure is released slowly. The soda doesn’t fizz. But if you go up too fast in diving, you take the pressure off too fast. You become like a bottle of soda with the cap popped off. The pressure lets go all at once, and the gasses inside the soda make bubbles and fizz over. Except in diving, the bubbles fizz in your blood. That’s bad news.

  It was the same bad news for me. Instead of going up at the ideal rate of fifteen feet per minute, I had shot upward like a cork. Nitrogen bubbles were already forming in my blood.

  Now, curled up in an ambulance that was racing down the streets with sirens on and lights flashing, my only hope was the recompression chamber at the end of the ride.

  On the outside, a recompression chamber looks like a mini-submarine, with gauges everywhere. Inside, it can seat up to three divers.

  At the military base, they rushed me inside.

  I did my best not to scream at the pain as they moved me toward the recompression chamber.

  They closed it on both ends, and began to pump air into it. The air wouldn’t escape and it would put pressure on my body. Just like putting a cap on the top of a bottle of soda to stop the fizzing.

  As long as it wasn’t too late.

  chapter seven

  I had about seven hours ahead in the recompression chamber. If I was lucky and survived.

  The pressure in the chamber rose to about two atmospheres. That’s double the pressure you feel standing outside.

  Actually, you don’t feel the pressure. You have just as much pressure inside you pushing out as you have air pressing down on you. That may sound confusing, but it’s like this.

  When you are on a beach, the entire weight of all the air above is pressing down on you. Sure, air doesn’t weigh a lot. But when there is sixty miles of it pressing down on you, it adds up.

  In fact, it could crush you.

  The reason it doesn’t is because it also fills you and pushes out.

  Still doesn’t make sense?

  Suck the air out of a plastic soda bottle and watch what happens. It crumples. The only reason it normally holds its shape is because the atmosphere is pushing air into it at the same time it is pushing air onto it.

  In the recompression chamber, the pressure against me was countered by the pressure inside me as the air filled my lungs. At the same time, it was stopping nitrogen bubbles from fizzing inside my blood.

  “How’s it feel?” The voice came from a doctor outside the chamber, through a speaker inside.

  “Better,” I said. “Much better.”

  I was able to sit up as the pain eased.

  “You’re a certified diver,” the doctor said. “Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So you know what to expect.”

/>   “Right.”

  But he told me anyway. “In a few hours, we’ll bring you up to thirty feet.”

  What he meant was that right now, my body was under the same pressure as it would be if I were sixty feet underwater. I was slowly getting rid of the nitrogen that had been forced into my blood by pressure. After some of it was gone, the pressure would be reduced.

  “I think you’ll be fine,” he said. “We’ll keep you monitored. In the meantime, there’s lots of stuff to read in there.”

  I nodded. I didn’t mind reading. I’d long gotten used to seeing every M in purple and every S in orange. It’s just the way I was. For a long time, when I was in elementary school, I thought everybody saw the alphabet the same way.

  Once I learned differently though, it wasn’t something I ever talked about. Peoplealready felt sorry enough for me because of my dad.

  You see, in the middle of my kindergarten year, he died.

  Or, at least, everyone thought he was dead.

  We lived in Chicago. Near the lake. He went sailing in his small boat one day and disappeared in a storm. The boat was found, and his life jacket washed up onshore. But no sign of him.

  My mom almost went crazy, she was so sad. Me too, but I didn’t really understand what had happened. All I can remember was that I’d fall asleep crying every night because my daddy had not come home. When he was finally declared legally dead, she cried for another couple of months. Me too.

  A few years later, someone from the life insurance company stopped by the house. He asked if my mom knew that my dad was still alive. And asked her what she had done with the life insurance money.

  She said it wasn’t true. And that she hadn’t collected any money.

  Then they showed her a photo of my dad with another woman. He was married to someone else. He had a different name. I never saw him again, but I learned to hate him anyway. I was glad he went to jail, but I never visited him.

  It turned out that he had faked his death and found a way to intercept the life insurance that should have been going into their joint account. After that, Mom really changed. Sad. Quiet. Never talked to people. Hardly even to me. It was like she was going through the motions of living.

  She sent me to Key West every summer. It’s almost like Uncle Gord raised me instead of her. Except Uncle Gord was more like an army sergeant than a father. I sure wasn’t going to tell him how weird I was. Tasting blackberries when I saw Sherri. Seeing bright red when something touched my left elbow. Stuff like that.

  So I just concentrated on what I loved best. Diving.

  As I sat in the recompression chamber, I wondered when I’d be able to dive next. Because if the broken valve wasn’t an accident, what would happen next?

  chapter eight

  The next morning, I was in the back room of Uncle Gord’s dive shop. Not dead. Not blind. Not bent over in pain. I had spent seven hours in the chamber, and the doctors had sent me on my way.

  “Your guess was right, Ian,” Uncle Gord said. “The broken valve wasn’t an accident.”

  Like my mother, Uncle Gord has hair that turned gray early. He has a bushy mustache that is still as dark as the rest of his hair used to be. Like my mother, he’s not real big. But he’s in great shape from diving all the time. He’s in his forties, but I doubt many people would want to mess with him in a fight.

  “Look at this,” he said.

  Gord’s Dive Shop has four rooms. There is the sales floor with scuba diving gear. Masks. Flippers. Wet suits. Spearguns. Tanks. Books on the sport. Everything.

  On one side is a doorway leading to a long and narrow room. This is the training room. It has a long table where up to twelve people can sit. At the front end is a chalk board. Uncle Gord uses this room when he gives dry-land lessons on scuba diving.

  There is also a back room with a work bench. It’s where we fill the scuba diving tanks with air and do repairs.

  The fourth room is Uncle Gord’s office. It is tiny. Hardly larger than his messy desk. He always keeps the door locked so that customers don’t wander in.

  He was standing at the work bench. Tools were scattered across the top of it.

  The valve parts of my scuba tank were in front of him.

  I moved beside him to look at the tank.

  “See,” he said, pointing. “Look at where the spring broke apart.”

  The spring was from the valve. It was strong enough to keep the valve partly closed against the air pressure inside the tank. Except it had broken into two pieces.

  “Yes?” I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “Use the magnifying glass.”

  I did. As I looked at it up close, he kept talking.

  “It’s like a tree you cut with a saw,” he said. Uncle Gord loved using examples. “The cut is smooth most of the way through. But when the tree falls, the last little bit breaks away and leaves a jagged edge.”

  He was right. On one side of the broken spring, it was shiny, as if it had been snipped halfway through. The other side was jagged, like it had been ripped apart.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “I do,” he told me. He frowned. “And I don’t like it.”

  I waited.

  “You know all about water pressure,” he said.

  I nodded yes. It had just about killed me the day earlier.

  “Someone took this valve apart and cut most of the way through the spring. Then he put it back together. The spring was still strong enough to hold in shallow water. But in deeper water, it would only be a matter of time until the pressure blew it apart.”

  “In other words,” I said, “someone wanted this accident to happen in deep water.”

  “Exactly. What if you had been deep inside the shipwreck when this happened instead of near the opening?”

  I gulped. Sometimes it takes ten minutes just to swim out of a wreck.

  “I’d be dead,” I told him.

  Uncle Gord stared at me for nearly a minute. He has light blue eyes. They didn’t blink as he thought about it.

  “I already know a lot of the story,” he finally said. “You dove instead of Judd.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Even though I had told you I wanted you on the surface in the boat.”

  “I’ve dived lots,” I said. “I’m certified. You taught me to be careful. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “What I mind is him not doing what I paid him for. He was supposed to go down into the wreck. Not you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Uncle Gord stared at me for another minute. I remembered some stories I’d heard about him getting into fights when he was younger. I’d heard he was tougher than most guys twice his size. By the cold look in his eyes, I was able to believe it.

  “Tell me,” he said. “Did you ask Judd if you could make the dive? Or did he ask you?”

  My body suddenly felt as cold as Uncle Gord’s eyes. I understood his question. If Judd had asked me to go down, maybehe knew about the valve and that it would bust in deep water.

  “I asked to dive,” I said. “Honest. It was my idea. I was bored and wanted something to do. It was my fault this happened.”

  Uncle Gord slammed the work bench so hard that a wrench jumped and fell to the floor.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” he said, his face angry. “It was the fault of whoever wrecked the valve spring.”

  He hit the table again. “I’m going to find out who did this.”

  Uncle Gord took a deep breath. He waited until he was calm.

  “Ian,” he said, “you and I are going to keep this a secret. That way, the person who did it won’t know we’re looking for him.”

  “What about the police?” I asked. “Shouldn’t they know?”

  Uncle Gord put his hands on my shoulders. He looked right into my eyes. “You know that business has not been great this year. What’s going happen if people hearabout this? They’ll think we don’t run safe dives. They might not buy equipment from us.”


  “But—”

  “No buts. I think I know why someone would have done this,” he said. “I’m going to tell you another secret. It’s the real reason why I take the dive boat out on Friday and Saturday nights.”

  I asked Uncle Gord a simple question. “Does any of this have anything to do with a sunken pirate ship and a ton of gold?”

  chapter nine

  Uncle Gord’s square jaw fell. For a second, with his eyes bugged out and his jaw open wide, he looked like a fish just pulled from water.

  “How did you know about that?” he said.

  “I don’t think it’s much of a secret,” I said. “This is a small town.”

  “Tell me what you know. Tell me how you know.”

  I shrugged. “I heard the rumor two weeks ago. When I was with Judd. We were at the dock, putting gas in the dive boat. One of the guys there asked me if it was true you were looking for a pirate ship.”

  “And?” Uncle Gord seemed worried.

  “I told the guy I didn’t know. Which was true. But I’ve been wondering. Along with a lot of other people in town. Everyone knows you go out every week with those three lawyers from Miami. No one believes that you are just a spear-fishing guide.”

  They had hired Uncle Gord every weekend since the beginning of May. Each Friday and Saturday night, Uncle Gord left at sunset with the three of them and didn’t return until dawn.

  “Spear fishing is what we’ve wanted people to believe,” Uncle Gord finally said. “But once you heard the rumors, why didn’t you ask me about it?”

  “It isn’t my business,” I said. “I figured you’d tell me if you ever wanted to.”

  Uncle Gord let out a deep breath. “I was afraid of this. That’s why I don’t like whathappened to the valve on your scuba tank. If our secret is out, maybe someone wants to stop us.”

  “Will you tell me about it now?” I asked. “Is it really true what people are saying?”

  He looked around, as if he were afraid someone might be listening. But there were no customers in the front or the back of the shop.

  Sherri wasn’t there either. I knew her schedule. She didn’t work until the afternoon.