Moondogs - Alexander Yates [95]
But sure enough, after doing a backward roll into the cold water on his first checkout dive, Benicio did what came natural. He held his breath. It wasn’t until his depth gauge read 25 feet that he realized what he was doing. Claustrophobia and panic set in quick. He took a single gulp of air through his mouthpiece and began to kick wildly for the surface, his eyes shut tight and tearing. A pain rose inside his chest—only later would he understand that it was the air expanding in his lungs, looking for a place to go. Something grabbed his ankle and when he opened his eyes and looked down he saw the dive instructor staring up at him with an expression of forced calm. She held him tight with one hand to keep him from ascending further. With the other she removed the regulator from her mouth. A steady stream of small bubbles poured out of her puckered lips and she pointed to them. “Respira,” she mouthed. “Breathe out.” Benicio exhaled and felt his insides scraped as air rushed out of his deflating chest. Then he took a single breath in. Out again. In again. Slowly, and not without embarrassment, he let her pull him back down to the sandy bottom where the other students were arranged in a clumsy, swaying semicircle.
The rest of the dive passed uneventfully for Benicio—he even redeemed himself a bit by being the first to be able to take his mask off, put it back on and fill it with air from his purged mouthpiece—but just before it was time to surface his father fell into his own trouble. They were drifting over a ledge of coral when his father, who’d loaded his weight belt to make up for the natural buoyancy of fat, began sinking much faster than he should have. He didn’t seem to notice at first, and even when he looked up and saw that the other members of the group had become vague silhouettes above, he didn’t try to swim back to them. In fact, to Benicio’s horror, he did the opposite. He started swimming down, kicking with a wild determination. Benicio made to follow him but the dive instructor gave him a very unambiguous hand signal indicating that he should wait with the other students. She disappeared into the haze below and returned some minutes later towing Howard behind her like a small parade float. Benicio pressed himself to his father’s mask and saw behind it two eyes that rolled about euphorically. His father pulled his mouthpiece out and let it float freely until the instructor put it back in. Once they surfaced she explained that he’d gotten himself stoned—that was her word, not Benicio’s—on the nitrogen in his tank by descending too quickly and too deeply. She also told them, in private back at the resort, that they both had to take all of the classroom sessions over again before she would let them back in the open water.
• • •
BUT THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO. Benicio was a much better diver now, and despite his lack of practice, the excursion with Katrina went well. They stayed shallow, hit swift but manageable current and flirted casually on their decompression stop. It was twilight when they got back to the hotel. They rinsed their gear in barrels of brackish water and left it drying on bamboo racks. Benicio was urgently hungry—diving, he remembered