The Blue: Part Five

Henri runs back to the beach with all of his gear. His heart is racing and he feels his anxiety acutely in his throat. When Lejab sees him, he scampers down the hunk of concrete he was playing lookout on and runs to Sonny’s side. He strips down to his underwear. He jumps into the water.
“Is he coming with us?” Henri asks. Sonny smiles and Henri sees his teeth and gums are stained orange from chewing the betel nut leaves.
“No, he stays by beach,” Sonny says. “Too dangerous for him in blue.” Henri looks away. His palms are sweating. “But not too dangerous for you. You’re strong enough.”
Henri climbs down to the beach and looks around. People stare at him. Taxis and trucks slow as they drive by.
“Whatever,” Henri says to himself. He quickly strips down to his underwear and almost falls over with one leg caught up in his shorts. Sonny gives him a thumbs up sign and waddles into the water with his fins on. He gets about knee-deep before he dives into the water. Henri swallows, straps on his fins, and wades after him. He passes Lejab splashing in the shallow water.
“Kwōj etal ňan jikin ek!” Lejab says to him. Henri laughs and then dives into the blue water.
He follows Sonny out over the reef. Sonny goes quickly and Henri thinks of little else aside from keeping up. They float over a shallow reef and Henri pretends he is an airplane. He keeps his body as close to the surface as he can so as to not be scraped by the coral. Unlike the lagoon that he is used to, the ocean side reef drops up very quickly and does not peter slowly deeper and deeper. Sonny is about twenty-five feet in front of him and when he gets to the edge of the reef, he simply disappears. Henri kicks harder and when he gets to the reef’s edge his breath is taken with the view.
Down, down, down stretching in ever darkening shades of blue from turquoise to a blue so sinister it is black, the reef drops in a sheer cliff. There are small shelves here and there all the way down until Henri can’t see anymore. Sonny is hovering about fifteen feet down above one of the shelves. Henri sees him let loose his spear and he tags a big clownfish right behind the eye. It is a perfect shot and the fish does little wriggling. Sonny grabs the spear and the fish skewered on it and kicks for the surface so he can string it onto his belt and get some air. He smiles at Henri as he passes. Henri goes to the surface too.
“Wow, that’s a fucking fish!” he shouts. Sonny, out of breath and treading water with just his legs, takes off his wire belt and punctures the eyes of the fish to thread the wire through. The two eye sacks let off bursts of milky fluid that float at the surface of the water like engine oil.
“There are more,” he says. “Many more.”
“OK.”
Henri takes a deep breath and kicks down to the same shelf Sonny had caught his fish on. As he goes down he happens to look over the edge of the shelf and the blue beyond. He wonders where it leads. Maybe hell? Worse even, maybe to a place not yet imagined. Henri shudders and focuses his eyes back to the ledge. There is a group of the biggest clownfish he’s ever seen. He notches his spear and pulls back on the medical tubing sling. He pulls it tighter and tighter in slow motion like Jeremy taught him. He takes aim at the biggest fish in the group, not out of vanity, but because it provides the easiest target. His aim is as true as on his first day and he nails the fish halfway down its body, just below the spine.
He smiles to himself and kicks hard to get it before it can wriggle off. As he gets deeper a huge shape rises up from the deep and passes so close to Henri he can feel his hair move in its wake. He forgets his spear and his fish and he looks up. He can just see the tail end of a huge shark, twelve feet, cruising up towards the surface. It is heading toward Sonny’s treading form at the quartz-like glimmering surface of the ocean. Henri swallows awkwardly in his fear and almost starts coughing but contains it at the last moment. The shark glides easily up to Sonny and then arcs away from him at the last moment and comes back down to where Henri is. Henri pushes back through the water until his back is against the reef wall. He can feel a sea urchin’s pins in his back, but he strangely feels no pain. It will come later. The shark narrowly misses him but arcs out over the blue, with no fear of its depth, and makes its way back towards Henri. Henri kicks madly for the surface but keeps an eye on the shark. Closer and closer it comes until Henri can make out its unfeeling eyes, it’s primordial nose slits, and its rows of ghastly teeth. Closer and closer it comes and its mouth opens wide…
Suddenly there is Sonny in between Henri and the shark. Sonny holds out his arm and the shark takes it in his teeth and with a squirm of its great body snaps off the limb easily. Sonny, one arm down, is left in a cloud of his own blood. The shark cruises a little ways off and lets the arm drop from its mouth. The arm starts to float down like leaves drop from trees. Sonny swims towards it awkwardly with his one arm. Henri wants to help but his lungs are lacking too badly for air. He scrambles for the surface.
He gasps air at the surface and then plants his face back into the water. His goggles have fogged up, but he can still see some. Sonny has his loose arm tucked firmly under his other arm and is reeling for the surface. The shark is coming at Sonny from below. Just before it strikes at Sonny again, he kicks it in the nose and, amazingly, the shark reels off. Sonny breaks the surface and moans. Henri grabs him and pulls him over the reefs edge to the shallow water beyond. Sonny stands and the blood from where his arm was ripped off at the elbow courses down and covers his left side. He is crying. His blood is everywhere in the water. Henri sees the shark’s fin surface briefly just off the reef’s edge before going under again. He takes off his goggles and straps the facemask over Sonny’s stub and stretches the strap firm over his shoulder. Sonny’s wound is pressed into the glass facemask and he screams.