Deep Light

The salt-crust on Toby’s eyelashes made the stars over Key Largo look like smeared tallow. He rolled backward off the gunwale of the small skiff, letting the warm, black Atlantic close over his head with a sound like a heavy door shutting. Below seventy feet, the water ceased to be water and became a thick, purple twilight where the beams of their dive lights died after ten paces. His brother, Jesse, was already ahead, his yellow fins flickering like dry banana leaves in a draft. They were searching for the remains of a concrete mixer that had slipped off the old Flagler trestle during a hurricane ninety years before, a steel carcass now swallowed by brain coral and sea fans.

Every movement required a slow, theatrical deliberation to prevent the silt from rising like flour from the seabed. Toby found his light illuminating a school of tiny silversides, their bodies knife-sharp and perfectly synchronized, parting around his regulator with the dry hiss of dry sand pouring through a funnel. Jesse was gesturing, his hand making wide, desperate circles near a ledge where the limestone dropped into the true deep. A pale, rectangular shape loomed out of the dark—not the mixer, but a storage chest, its brass corners eaten away by the tide, its lock fused into a green, weeping knot of oxide.

They did not open it; one did not disturb the relics of those who had died with salt in their lungs during the great railway days. Instead, Toby rested his gloved fingers on the cold metal, feeling the vibration of some distant freighter’s propellers humming through the continental shelf. The water temperature was dropping, a cold finger of the Gulf Stream reaching up from the bottom to warn them away. Jesse pointed upward, where the surface appeared as a shifting screen of pale green silk, and they began their long, slow ascent, leaving the chest to the dark crabs that were already crawling out from beneath its shadow.