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DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH
Once upon a time there was a pig. A fake pig. A pig stuffed with diamonds. The little girls liked to ride the pig and pull on his curly leather tail. That tail was so enticing that it ended up attached only by two stitches and the idea of needing to stay on to complete the image of pigness.
Where did the diamonds come from? Well, that's the story.
Deep in the jungles of South America, where rock and tree alike are wrapped in the green towel of verdure, like Mother Nature's favorite child still dripping from its bath, one small hill was particularly favored by the attentive caress of vines and moss and splay petalled orchids. The hill was unobtrusive, unimpressive; close enough to higher mountains not to stand out, yet far away enough to be left alone. No human foot had ever crossed its peak, no hands had touched its stone.
And so it was a shock to parrot, macaque, and giant butterfly alike the day the machetes and bandanas, boots and pickaxes cut a scar into the side of the hill and left 11 months later, satchels full of semi-opaque rocks. The vines and bushes covered the scar soon enough, but the hill always knew it was there.
Catch up with the sweating, swaying, stinging men, mules and mosquitos as they make their way from jungle to town. Hand over the satchels for a lump of cash that they press to their thigh inside their pockets for one night only. The irony that their bodies are buried only feet from the small stash of stones that they had palmed from the bags and planned to dig up in a year when their services had been forgotten.
Follow the bag on the plane, into offices. The stones are separated like a set of racked billiard balls, scattering to all corners of the world.
A handful of them wound up here. In Alberta, purchased by a man with more money than scruples, and intended as the centerpiece in an insurance scam. They were never intended to be cut. They were intended to end up at the bottom of the lake; expendable counterbalance to a much larger scheme.
Which is how I found them.
Nobody scuba dives in Alberta. The fish are grey, eye-bulging monsters that swoop out of a dark coldness to glare and gape their tiny pointed gums at you, then flick a tail and retreat back to the gloom.
But I didn't care about the fish. I was after a much larger game: treasure. Specifically a small boat that had planned a rendezvous with some fur-trappers and never made it. The boat went down with a chest full of coins.
I had a drysuit and my scuba gear, and I intended to become the new owner of that chest. I rented a cottage on the shore and spent my days 40 feet below, criss-crossing the silty bottom of the lake, praying for the sight of a ship looming up out out of the gloom.
And that's exactly what happened, but not exactly as I'd imagined; isn't that just the way? On a morning too foggy to dive, I stood on the dock, decked out in full array, and I thought about packing my gear up for the season and migrating south.
The ripples playing against the wooden uprights turned to splashes and then waves, as a boat loomed up out of the fog. There were shouts. A bang, as if someone let off a late firecracker. And then a cry and a splash. A small dinghy peeled away from the boat, and vanished into the fog. The boat blossomed with fire. A grinding, rending noise, and it split into fore and aft, easing below the surface, and mixing smoke with fog.
The cry came again, and without desiring go, I stepped off the pier and began flippering towards the boat.
It was cold. It was grey. The air was just a less-dense continuation of the lake. I reached the scattered flotsam and searched above and below for a thrashing, frightened figure. Nothing kicked or flailed, and after wasting too much time pulling and grabbing at dangling life jackets and chaise cushions, I went under. My torch gave me two feet of bubbles in front, a double handsbreadth side to side. I spiraled downwards, peering and torquing from one dim pocket of nothing to another. Things drifted past my view: books, an icebucket, a watch.
Deeper, deeper, and then the bottom. The wreck I had been hunting for months, shrouded in silt like a manta ray digging itself under, to safety. No body. Nobody. I stayed until my air ran out, shining the light into the impenetrable murk. Finding that there was nothing to be found.
The next day was sunny and smug. Only the sky and myself knew what lay deep down under that still, calm surface. I wasn't going to go. The blazing sun was a warning flare, telling me that if I sought, I would find. And warning me that I might not like what I found.
I went. In the end, the routine of suiting up and slipping under was more comforting than any other course of action or inaction. I could have called the police. I had a phone. But I didn't want to make it have really happened. Not yet.
I went out fifty strokes, and then down. The bottom was as still and empty as the sky. Did I swim farther last night, in my panic, or was I going in the wrong direction altogether? I swam in my accustomed grid pattern: twenty kicks to the side, 90º turn, ten kicks, 90º turn, and back the direction I came from. The routine, the monotony, and my thoughts settling down to the languorous tail-flick of a lonely grouper. And then to nothing at all as I counted kicks back and forth, back and forth.
I was lost in the dream of my fur ship when I saw its wooden prow poking out of the silty bottom. How ironic, how unfair, to find what I was looking for as soon as I began looking for something else. But when I touched it, when I shined the torch on the painted planks, black and bubbly from a gasoline-fueled fire, I knew that the fur ship would wait, perhaps forever.
The bottom was calm today, all the silt settled. The pieces were arrayed around the two parts of the hull in a distribution that seemed too perfect to be random. But what hand could be arranging and tidying down here? A chill as I remembered how big and how deep this lake is, and how naked and alone I am. I floated motionless, listening to the rasp/burp of the respirator, and feeling my rapid pulse more than hearing it in my ears. I grabbed at the training I had had, when I was new and panicked; how to iris down all thoughts to the sound of the breath, the breath that was outside, around, but not of me. The breath that was slowing, slowing, curious how I heard it slowing, until, until at last it slowed, it slowed, it was smooth, and long, and slow, and I gradually irised out my awareness to take in the spar I clung to with one hand, my leg bobbing against the bottom of the lake, the light from my torch illuminating a brass railing, jutting out of the silt.
I was calm and ready to move forward and yet still entranced enough that as I glided over the wreckage I was removed from what I saw. I didn't look for the body. In my serene state there was no connection between this heap of scrap and the scene I had witnessed yesterday. Yes, witness. That's what the judge would call me.
And at that I came to, flailing and gasping for air, panicked, “Where am I? Where am I?” And the horror of the answer: “forty feet under a crushing, freezing mass of water.” I struggled up, up, and felt the pressure change in my ears. Too fast, too fast. But forty feet is hardly enough time to remember the words “the bends” and I had ripped off my face mask and was bobbing and gasping and crying before the adrenaline shakes hit.
No more diving that day.
Or the next.
But the third was sunny and calm again, and those glints of silver on the surface mocked me. I went. I found the wreck again and hovered over it. I spoke to it in my mind. I asked it if I could come aboard. I asked: didn't it want its story told, its final story? I asked it to hide anything from me that I didn't want to see. And I approached it slowly, still babbling soothingly to it in my mind, as if it were a skittish horse. And I touched it. I ran my hand along the smooth cabin edge. I fingered the twisted window frame. I entered the ripped open compartment and rummaged through floating papers, and opened cabinets, and dug under planks of wood, and tugged on loose bits of cloth...and out tumbled a handful of rocks, glinting in the torch light as they fell through the ripped open velvet bag and landed with a poof of silt below the steering wheel.
I picked up the rocks. I tore off the loose flap of velvet and wrapped it around them like a pouch, twisting the end and entwining it between my fingers. I spiraled slowly to the surface, the textbook picture of a safe ascent. I paddled home. I had the rocks under my mattress, and burned the velvet cloth when it was dry.
Complicit. Accomplice. Thief. Which word would the judge use now? How long did a thing have to be underwater before it was considered salvage?
I carried those rocks with me from place to place. I dared not sell them. I couldn't let them go. I couldn't risk finding out that they were quartz; not after all the sleepless nights, the bargaining, the slightly fishy scent that never fully washed out of my hair or my clothes.
When I knew that the hooded one was coming for me at last, not my scarecrow imaginings, but the hard-boned spectre of eternity, I got some leather and some stuffing. I thought of the security of my penny bank when I was six; all the gleanings of others' generosity, or oversight, being tucked away in the pot belly of my very own earthenware treasure chest. I thought of the sacrifices to the gods; the offerings. I thought of the irony that such a skin would again resume a shape so similar to the one of which it had been deprived. And I thought of that spirit that is deepest in joy while rooting around in the dirt, the earth, the solid land, digging up treasures and secrets from Mother Nature's blackest loam. And I thought about forgiveness.
I sewed the rocks into a counterfeit pig and put it in my attic, to be found an divvied up with all my other fake treasures when I lived no longer. And then I lay down and sank into the black, cold deep.
Andrea Blumberg
© Andrea Blumberg 2016-2020