The Bottom Buster

by Frederick D. Schoeneman

Even on a little race—out to Alcatraz and back—a clean hull makes a difference. And my geeks like to win. Especially my Oracle geeks. Their boss, Larry Ellison, loves a winner. Especially against one of the Siebel geeks. Beating Tom Siebel gets Larry’s dick all hard. And seeing Larry’s dick all hard makes my geeks smile, which is cool. I do the job right, Ellison has eight inches of iron, my geeks pay me right, and, well, then I’m one step closer to getting through life without hurting anyone.

Last Saturday, one of my Oracle geeks wanted to be out of his slip by 0745, which meant I had to be done by 0730, if I didn’t want him warming up his engine while I was cleaning his props. But I don’t like to dive so early, because it’s cold. The Bay is always cold, but at 0700, it’s colder than one of those Merchant-Ivory films.

I tried to heat up my wetsuit during the night, but my space heater blew a fuse and I was too stoned to fix it. He was a good client, though, who usually paid up within a few days of being invoiced, so I sucked it up and stepped into the farmer john. It was still wet from the day before.

Cold.

That morning the flow of blood through my capillaries clamped shut, leaving the skin on my legs curdled and white. Like a plucked chicken’s. The cold neoprene on my testicle was like salt on a snail, and I felt him hiding up inside me like my stomach was his shell.

I shivered from my Morgan 45 onto the dock and wheeled my Bottom Buster cart over to the Far-Forties clustered around C-Dock. I plugged in my compressor, strapped on a pair of fins, buckled up my weight belt, spit into my mask, chomped into the regulator, and tried not to think. Thinking is the enemy. At the beginning of a day like this, sleepiness is my friend. It lends me the courage to get started. It pushes me from the dock and it pulls me into the water, where all the good dreams fade away.

Fast.

My hood wasn’t properly tucked under my jacket and the pads on the fingers of my gloves had worn through; the water woke my shit right up. I started sucking short-shallow breaths through the regulator to minimize the amount of chest area exposed to the cold.

Then I turned on my heater.

Some mornings, when I’ve been drinking Bud instead of smoking it, the heater can go on and on. Not that morning. It died after about 15 seconds, even accounting for taps, barely enough time for my adrenaline to get pumping and cover the transition into work mode.

The only way to operate down there is by feel.

I started at the bow and moved to the stern, my arm extended and pressing firm to wipe away a film of muck, baby-shit brown at the waterline. It would be scary if I was one of those claustrophobics. I’m not. To me it’s like curling up inside a womb, with green and brown tissue floating around in the amniotic fluid and an umbilical stretched to my mouth instead of my bellybutton. I map out the hull like an archaeologist and work methodically in terms of grid squares. Turn around at the bow and slip four feet

down to catch the next level of the hull, follow it back to the stern and then

down to the next level and follow it up to the bow and then

down to do each side of the keel, and the rudder, and the running gear, getting it all done right the first time. Because, yeah, I’m that good. And because it’s a pretty safe bet that nobody’s going to dive in afterward to check my work....

Frederick D. Schoeneman lives in San Francisco. This is his first fiction in print. E-mail: fred.schoeneman@gmail.com