Skinny-Dipping at Monster Lake (12 page)

“Bubbles?” Chet's head tilted to one side and he let out a little laugh. “All that over some bubbles? That's as bad as Kent's wild catfish attack.”

Everyone started laughing. Only instead of laughing with them, like I did when the catfish scared me, Daniel got mad. No longer crying, he puffed his chest out and pushed his shoulders back.

“Not just bubbles,” he snapped, trying to take charge again. “I've seen bubbles from turtles or little pockets of air oozing up from the mud. These bubbles were huge. It was like . . . like somebody had flushed a giant toilet. Just a big
baloosh
!”

“Like air coming from a scuba tank?” Pepper frowned.

Daniel shook his head. “No. Bigger. Lots bigger.”

Jordan left us and walked out on the log. He stood, staring down at the water, then raced back. “It's right there!” he yelped. “Right under the tree.
I could hear it, even without putting my head under the water.” He turned to me. “I need your mask and snorkel.”

I shook my head. “You can't see down there. Not after the rain and at night.”

“Don't need to see,” Jordan said. “Just have to keep my head under long enough to communicate.” He turned to Ted. “Go up to Mrs. Baum's and see if she'll give you a couple of wrenches or something. I need two pieces of metal I can clank together so I can send Morse code.”

I sprinted for home.

Ted and I got back about the same time. I handed Jordan the snorkel and mask. Ted handed him two large rusty wrenches.

“Mrs. Baum wasn't home. That's why it took me so long,” he explained. “But Dad and I helped clean her barn out last summer. I remembered seeing these, so I just went and got them.”

Jordan put the mask and snorkel on. Holding the wrenches, he walked out on the log, found a big limb that was lying in the water, and draped himself over it. It looked kind of weird. His legs dangled down on one side and his head and arms dangled down on the other. All we could see was his rear end sticking up in the air.

We waited. And waited. Finally Jordan came
back and stood on the base of the log, looking down at us.

“Okay. We need help. There's some guy trapped in a submarine. I think the tree fell on him or something. He's running out of air and can't get out.”

There was total silence. I guess everybody else was thinking the same thing I was.

Submarine?

In Cedar Lake?

We stared at Jordan. No one breathed. No one blinked. We just stared.

The silence grew and grew. No waves lapped the shore. No crickets chirped in the grass.

Just silence.

D
aniel's laugh finally broke the silence. It wasn't a fun laugh. It was one of those dirty, ugly laughs that irritated the night stillness like a pesky mosquito humming in your ear.

“Submarine in Cedar Lake. Ha! That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard. What are you trying to pull?”

Daniel made a complete turnaround from the scared little kid with tears rolling down his cheeks. He didn't even act like the same guy that I had saved only moments earlier. Arms folded and eyes narrowed, he got right in Jordan's face.

Jordan sighed and raised his finger to the bridge of his nose so he could push his glasses up. Then he remembered he didn't have any glasses on, so he sighed again.

“Okay. I tapped out two short, two long, and two short. That's Morse code for
question.
You know, a question mark . . .”

“And?” Daniel snipped, still not believing a word Jordan said.

“And . . . they tapped back three short—the letter
s,
two shorts and one long—the letter
u,
followed by a long and three shorts—the letter
b.
In other words—
sub.
Then I tapped—”

“Wait a minute, Jordan,” I said, cutting him off. “We don't have time to learn that code stuff right now. Just tell us what they said.”

“Oh.” He shrugged. “Okay. They said, ‘Sub. Trapped. Need air.' ”

All we could do was stand there. The silence swept in again. We stared at Jordan. Stared at the lake, then stared back at Jordan again.

“There's no way someone could get a submarine in Cedar Lake,” Pepper scoffed. “Those things are huge.”

Chet shook his head. “Not necessarily. Some submersibles are quite small. Why, even back in World War II, the Japanese were using two-man subs to spy on Honolulu and—”

“And . . .” Jordan cut in, “I was doing some research the other day on the Cayman Islands. They have these two- or three-man submersibles that can dive to over three thousand feet. They're really heavy, but they're relatively small, compared to what we normally think of as a submarine.

Foster waved his hands. “Okay, so there are
small submarines. But . . . but why in Cedar Lake?”

No one—not even Jordan—had an answer to that one.

Ted turned and started up the hill. “Look, it doesn't matter. Someone is trapped down there, in something. They're trapped, running out of air, and we have to help them. Come on, Kent.”

I headed up the hill—but Ted went left and I went right. “Where you going?” he called.

“Mrs. Baum's. It's closer.”

“She's not home.”

I frowned. “Are you sure?”

“When I went after the wrenches for Jordan, I pounded on both doors until my hand hurt. She's not home.”

We jogged to my house to call. I didn't have the nerve to tell the dispatcher that there was a submarine in Cedar Lake. I simply said there was someone trapped underwater and we needed the Emergency Rescue Unit. The man on the phone could tell I was a kid, and he started questioning me. When I told him who I was, he knew Dad, he knew he was at a wedding shower at the church, and he said he'd notify him, too.

“Be sure and tell him that I'm fine. And none of us kids is hurt or in trouble. Otherwise, he'll flip out.”

The dispatcher promised he would.

The summer after we first moved here, Mom and Dad had a big picnic and invited a whole bunch of the firefighters who Dad worked with. Since most of the guys knew where we lived, our driveway is where we decided to wait.

I saw the lights before I ever heard the siren.

Blue, yellow, and red flashed and streaked across the dam so fast that the EMS truck was almost to the middle before the sound reached me. At the corner of the dam, I lost sight of them for a moment. Then they were on our road, headed straight for me.

The EMS truck slowed. Then I guess when they saw me waving in their headlights, they sped up and slid to a stop right beside where Ted and I stood.

“Hey, squirt,” a familiar voice greeted. “How's my old fishin' buddy?”

It was Greg Ratcliff. Greg was one of Dad's fishing buddies. He was fun and I liked it when he came to the house or when Dad let me go fishing with the two of them. Pete Barsto drove the truck. He leaned around Greg and nodded. Pete was a short, stocky young man with dark skin and brown eyes. He was nice, too, only he wasn't as much fun as Greg.

Arms dangling over the passenger-side doorway, Greg reached out and ruffled my hair. “Hear you got a problem. Where we supposed to be?”

Ted and I hopped on the running boards on either side of the truck. Pete drove slowly, until we got to the gate that opened into the vacant lot. There, I hopped off and pointed toward the lake. “The water's about sixty yards down that way. The tree's about twenty yards left of the fence line, here. You'll see the guys standing around. That's where it is.”

“Don't want to get stuck or lose the light trailer we're pulling. Any ravines or creeks to fall into?”

“I don't think so.”

Greg glanced to the other side, where Ted was hanging on. “Son, why don't you and I walk in front. We'll watch for drop-offs, and Kent can wait here for his father.”

“Dad's coming?”

“Not more than five minutes behind us. We'll go ahead and set up, okay, squirt?”

“Sure, Greg.”

I watched them drive down the hill and stop. When I glanced back to the dam, three more sets of headlights were racing across. They weren't going as fast as the EMS unit had, but almost.

Greg and Pete already had the light trailer
unhooked and set up by the time Dad and the other fathers arrived. I rode down with Dad and Mr. Aikman.

Snorkel and mask in hand, Pete walked toward the lake. Greg was still trying to get the lights on. There was a long pole on one side of the trailer with a bank of about five enormous floodlights. They had raised the pole and locked it in place, then extended the telescoping part until the lights were about fifteen feet up in the air. Greg pulled on this cord, over and over again, as if starting a lawnmower. Finally the generator coughed and sputtered a couple of times. He pulled again and it settled to a smooth almost quiet hum. Once it was running, he turned the lights on.

Suddenly it was bright as day.

After parking their cars out of the way, the other men came pouring out, trying to find their sons. Chet was out on the fallen tree. Foster, Daniel, Ted, Pepper, and Zane stood near the clump of dirt-covered roots at the base. When the lights came on, they flinched and quickly raised a hand to shelter their eyes from the bright glare. The dads, who stood right beside me, kind of surged forward. Necks stretched and standing on their tiptoes, each searched for his son. One at a time they seemed to relax. All but Jordan's dad.

“Jordan? Where are you? Jordan?”

As bright as it was, I already had Jordan spotted. Chet crouched on the tree trunk, right where the branches were under the water. Jordan was lying across one of the bigger limbs. All I could see was his back and the tip of my snorkel. When Chet tapped his leg, he brought his head up and looked around. Then Chet said something to him. Jordan pulled the mask off and got to his knees.

“I'm down here, Dad. I'm fine. But you need to tell the rescue people to hurry.”

We headed down to the shore. About the time we got there, Pete Barsto raised his head above water.

“Greg,” he called. “They're right. There's somebody down here. When Simon gets here, have him—”

“I'm here, Pete!” Dad called.

“Good, Simon. Let's get our stuff on. We'll have to go take a look. Oh . . . need the lights, too.”

Pete Barsto was quite a bit younger than Dad. He didn't jog to the truck, he sprinted. We heard the door fly open, and in just a matter of seconds both men were out of their clothes and into their wet suits. Gear in hand, they trotted to the edge of the lake. Then they waded out into the water and then . . .

They were gone.

The only thing left was a swirl of water, glistening in the glow of the big floodlights.

I held my breath, watching. In the daylight I could always find a bubble trail—bubbles coming up whenever someone exhales. In the dark I couldn't see a thing. I didn't like Dad being out of my sight. I didn't like him diving in the dark. Hardly realizing how long I'd been holding my breath, the air made a big poof sound when I let it out and sucked in a new one.

Then I started pacing.

Dad paced, sometimes, when he was really nervous. I never did.

“He's okay,” I whispered to myself when I was away from the others. “He's been with the fire department for a long time. He's done lots of underwater rescues. Well, not lots, but some. And . . . and . . . there are tree limbs and probably barbed wire and hard telling what else down there. And . . . and . . . it's night. It's dark.”

The word
dark
hung in my throat. And when it came out, it hung in the night air like an unseen spider's web.

W
hen Dad and Pete Barsto surfaced and swam into shore, it was like an unspoken signal for us to rush closer and see what was going on. We were all careful not to crowd them or get in the way. At the same time everyone simply
had to be
close enough to hear what was said.

“Submarine,” Dad said.

There was no expression to his voice. Just the word. He didn't even look at us. He just stared down at the ground and shook his head. Finally he glanced up at Pete Barsto. “Submarine?”

Pete nodded. “That's what I saw.” He shrugged. “Thing's about nine feet long,” he explained to us. “Teardrop shaped. Wheel-operated hatch on the top. About five feet in diameter and tapers to a propeller with a guard around it at the back.” He looked at Dad. “Did you see anybody inside?”

Dad shook his head. “There's a small glass view port. Too many tree limbs, though. I couldn't get close enough to look inside.”

Jordan and Greg had come down the log to listen, too.

“Any way we can pull it out?” Greg asked.

Dad cleared his throat.

“Pinned under the limbs of that cottonwood. Doesn't appear to be any damage to it—but it's stuck, that's for sure.”

“Maybe we could pull the tree off,” Greg suggested.

“No way,” Pete said with a quick shake of his head. “That thing is enormous. Take three wreckers to budge that tree.” He folded his lips inside his mouth and nibbled on them. “Maybe if we cut some of the bigger branches off, we could get it loose.”

Dad folded his arms and shot a blast of air up his forehead.

“That won't work. The big limbs that have the thing pinned are on the underside of the tree. Can't cut underwater.”

As they kept discussing what to do, the rest of us sort of inched closer. I noticed Foster wasn't quite with the group. He stood over to the side, looking at the big tree in the water. Then he stared up at the other cottonwood tree, the one that was still standing. Then back down at the water again.

“Mr. Morgan,” he called. “Exactly where is the sub?”

Dad pointed. “Little to the right of center, about twenty-five feet out.”