Divisadero - Michael Ondaatje [7]
The minute Coop opened the trapdoor and looked down, panic hit him. There was in his mind the possibility of a snake or even a corpse in that unseen water. He stood for a last moment in the sunlight, pulled up the ladder he’d used to climb onto the apron roof, and dropped it down through the water. Then he removed his clothes, attached a slim hammer to the belt around his waist, and descended into the tank.
Around his wrist were tight rubber bands, and tucked into them pencil-shaped pieces of redwood. He’d been sent to Abdon Lumber in Petaluma. The old men there with furls of wood shavings attached to their arms had politely told him, after he asked to speak with Mr. Abdon, that Abdon was the patron saint of barrel makers. Coop assumed that once he found the leak he could pound in dry shims from outside the water tower, but these men who built and mended wine barrels proposed sharpened sticks of redwood or cedar, and recommended he drive them into the holes from the inside so that dampened they would eventually swell up. Redwood, they told him, lasted over a hundred years, even if it had lain sunk at the bottom of a river.
He let go of the ladder and swam into darkness until he reached a wall. The leak would not be under the water or above it, where the wood was dry, but somewhere around the surface line where the two met. Wood deteriorated at a boundary, it was where the weakness would occur. He was treading water, his fingers on the slippery edges. He had to feel for the leak, would not be able to identify it by sight. This could take hours, or days, in the numbing cold and in the windlessness of the tank. Even when his fingers discovered the initials he had cut into the wood years before, he was not appeased. It suggested a fate. How many times in his life would he or this family need to fix the tank? They had built a prison for themselves.
He climbed out shivering, put on his pants and shirt, and stood in the bliss of the sun. He saw Anna and Claire waving from the second-storey window of the farmhouse. When he got warm he went down again.
How we are almost nothing. We think, in our youth, we are the centre of the universe, but we simply respond, go this way or that by accident, survive or improve by the luck of the draw, with little choice or determination on our part. Years later, if he had been able to look back, Coop might have attempted to discern or reconsider aspects of his or Claire’s or Anna’s character, but when he had waved back to them, standing in the afternoon sunlight, Anna and Claire were interchangeable, one yellow shirt, one green, and he would not have been able to tell who wore this or that colour. And when he was back in the darkness of the water tank, there was just a retrospective image of the two girls, a tree branch partially concealing their identities and their waving arms.
Once more, as he swam in the water, his fingers touched the wood for any clue of disintegration, some small tear. Coop preferred metal, the smell of it, oil in a crankcase, rust on a chain, all those varieties and moods of metal life. Reviving a car brought with it the possibility of another life, whereas this family rarely left the farm. The father had once ventured across the border into Nevada and spoke of it still as something foolish and unnecessary, perhaps dangerous. But Coop loved risk and could be passive around danger. He’d been gathered into this fold by a neighbour whose wife died a few months later in childbirth. He knew all things were held in the palm of chance.
He had covered most of the circumference of the tank before he found the leak. He gave a false,