ensnared in branches.
I flashed my light around and momentarily lost the rope, and Lopez. Then, just as suddenly, there he was. I could see the danger - how easy it would be to get disoriented, tangled, panicked.
We floated, suspended above the tree, shining our lights on each other. I felt colder than I'd ever felt. My whole body was tight, like I'd been shoehorned into a much smaller man's wet suit.
Lopez signed, Okay?
I should've made the soso gesture, but I responded Okay.
Lopez tapped his computer. I checked mine. My air supply read 2,700 psi. Depth: ninetyeight feet. Lopez pointed to the rope, then down to the tree, then used more gestures to indicate that since the rope had gone straight through the branches, we'd have to navigate around the circumference of the tree and underneath. Was I okay with that? I made the Okay sign.
He tapped his watch, held up ten fingers. Ten minutes. The clock had started running.
We turned horizontal, angled ourselves down, then carefully descended around the periphery of the pecan tree.
It must've been a monstrous specimen when alive, and down here in the murk it seemed even bigger. We tried to keep a safe distance, but the tree kept surprising us.
We kept getting brushed and snagged, clawed at, almost impaled on branches that were worn to silty pikes from the decades underwater.
Then, at last, we were below the lowest boughs, shining our lights on a trunk so large our hands might just have met had we tried to hug its diameter.
Lopez plinked to get my attention again, gestured with his flashlight. He was warning me not to get too close to the bottom. It wasn't really solid below me - just a fuzzy layer of silt, lumpy and pitch black, like the remains at the bottom of a barbecue pit. Our line from the surface went straight down into the stuff, the anchor completely submerged.
Lopez gestured for me to come over and stay by the rope. He produced a second line from his supply bag - the tender line. He made a loose shepherd's knot, and slipped it around my wrist. He checked his computer, apparently calculating our GPS, then pointed off in one direction, pointed to himself.
I nodded.
Lopez measured out two yards of line the way they do in fabric stores - running the line from his nose to extended thumb. He handed me the slack. Six feet seemed a ridiculously small distance to start with, given how little time we had, but then Lopez moved away, and within a few feet he was gone.
There was no logic to it, what you could see and what you couldn't. In one direction, through a clearer patch of water, I could almost make out the trunk of the next tree in the row, but I couldn't see Lopez six feet away. If I shone my flashlight directly on him, I could just barely make out a smudge of black.
He gave me two quick tugs on the rope. I fed him another six feet of line, and then he was gone completely. I was alone.
I shone my light up through the branches of the ancient pecan. It must've been frozen in winter, fiftyplus years ago, but it looked
like it might've been submerged yesterday. There were still hardened knobs of pecans clinging to a few branches, more delicate black claws of open pods - things you would not think could withstand the flooding of an entire valley. The texture of the bark was still discernible. I wondered if the McBrides had picnicked here once, looked up at the sun through the branches, been grateful for the shade back on a Texas summer day before they'd had airconditioning, when Austin had still been a small town a day's wagon ride away.
I reminded myself, a little dreamily, that I'd come down here to do a job. I checked my console - one hundred two feet below. The timer read 12:04 minutes, total dive time.
My breathing had almost slowed to normal. I was relaxed. I started smiling for no particular reason, staring up into the branches of the tree.
Then I was brought back to reality by one sharp tug on the tender line. It meant more than just stop. We hadn't discussed it, but I was afraid that kind of tug must mean, 1
found something.
I waited. The cold enveloped me.
I calculated that Lopez was fifteen feet away now, but I couldn't see anything except the faintest bleached spot in the dark, perhaps