Peter Benchley - The Deep

His mind barely registered the change in the pitch of the electric motor, rising from a whine to a complaint.

When the cage bucked once, then stopped, he was not afraid; he assumed that someone, somewhere, had pushed a “stop” button, and soon that same someone would push a “g” button. He waited.

The motor was still racing, like an automobile engine in neutral with the accelerator pushed to the floor.

Sanders pressed the “down” button. There was a click, but no change in the sound. He pushed the “up” button. Another click. The elevator did not move. He looked up. There was no roof to the cage, and he could see the top of the cliff, perhaps fifteen feet away.

When Gail got to the top of the stairs, she was breathing hard, and her thighs ached. She walked along the path for a few yards and was surprised to see that the elevator wasn’t there. Her first thought made her smile: David chickened out and was following her up the stairs. She returned to the staircase and looked down; it was empty. Her next thought made beads of sweat break out on her forehead. She ran to where the elevator should have been and, supporting herself on a guardrail, leaned over the edge of the cliff.

She was relieved: the cage was still there-at least it hadn’t pulled away from the pole and crashed to the bottom. Sanders had reached his hands through the bars in the cage and was gripping the pole.

“Are you all right?” she called.

“It just stopped.”

Gail looked at the machinery by the top of the elevator shaft. Two steel arms extended from concrete bases and encircled the pole. There was a large metal box, containing, she presumed, the motor. But there were no obvious controls, no buttons. “Don’t move!” she said. “I’ll get help.”

She ran into the lobby of the Orange Grove Club, ignoring sternly worded signs prohibiting “bathing costumes and bare feet” in the public rooms of the club.

“The elevator’s stuck!” she shouted as she approached the front desk. “My husband’s caught inside.”

The elderly clerk at the front desk was dressed in a morning coat, and he seemed more concerned about Gail’s lack of clothing than about her alarm. All he said was “Yes.”

“The elevator’s stuck! My husband’s-was “Yes,” the clerk said again. He picked up a telephone and dialed one digit.

“Well, do something!” Gail said.

“I am, madam.” He spoke into the phone.

“Clarence? It’s happened again,” he said, with a teasing I-told-you-so tone. He hung up and said to Gail, “Help will be along presently.”

“What do you mean, “presently”?”

“Madam,” the clerk said stiffly, “if you’d care to wait on the veranda…” He cast a disapproving eye on Gail’s bare midriff.

As soon as Gail was outside, she started to run, and then she saw Sanders, waiting for her at the top of the cliff, a grin on his face. Gail ran to him, put her arms around him, and kissed him.

“I was so worried…,” she said. “How did you make it work?”

“Make what work? I shinnied up the pole.”

“You did what ?”

“Shinnied. You know… shinnied.”

Unbelieving, Gail looked over the edge of the cliff. The elevator was where it had been, their diving gear still inside.

“Why?”

“I’d never done it before.”

She looked at him and felt a sudden rush of anger. “Are you trying to kill yourself?”

“Don’t be silly. It was a calculated risk. I thought I could do it, and I did.”

“What if you’d been wrong.”

“Yeah, well, those are the chances you take.” He noticed the fury in her face. “C’mon, everything’s…” He saw her hand coming at him, and he ducked. Her fist grazed the top of his head.

“For Christ sake!” he said, raising his arm to ward off the second blow. He grabbed her, pinned her arms to her sides, and brought her to him. “Hey… nobody got hurt.”

She struggled briefly, then stood still and let him hold her. “Who are you trying to impress?” she said.

As he started to answer, Sanders heard footsteps behind him. He turned to see an old black man carrying a ring of keys. The man was muttering.

“What went wrong?” Sanders asked.

“Temp’amental like a baby.” The man searched for the key to open the metal box.

“Does this happen often?”

The man didn’t answer. He opened the box, reached inside, and nicked a switch. Immediately, the pitch of the motor dropped back to normal. The man pushed something else, and, after a couple of clicks, wheels began to turn. Within seconds, the elevator was at the top of the cliff. The man shut the door, turned the key in the lock, and started away.

“Hey,” Sanders said. “What happened?”

“Never know. Maybe too hot, maybe too cold.”

“It’s not going to fall off the pole, is it?”

“Never happen. If something ain’t just right, there’s clamps that suck right down on that pole like a old octopus. No, all that ever happen is she get stuck. If people just be patient, they be okay.”

When the man had left, Sanders unloaded the diving gear. “Give me a hand with this?” he said to Gail.

She didn’t move. She looked at him and said flatly, “Don’t you ever do something like that again.”

Sanders stepped out of the shower, dried himself, and stood before the bathroom mirror. He tightened his pectoral and stomach muscles and was pleased to see the muscle fibers showing through the skin. He patted his stomach and smiled.

The bathroom door opened behind him, and he felt a cool breeze that carried the aroma of Gail.

Gently, Gail pinched the insignificant flesh that sat above his hipbones. “Don’t exercise too much,” she said. “I’d hate it if you lost your love handles.”

“Never.” Sanders turned and kissed her.

They dressed for dinner, and as they left the cottage, Sanders slammed the door, turned the key in the lock, and jiggled the doorknob to make sure the lock was fast.

“Who’s going to steal anything?” Gail asked.

“Anybody. Cameras, diving gear-it’s expensive stuff. No point in making it easy to get at.”

“Well, locking the door won’t do any good. The maid has a key.”

Holding hands, they walked along the path to the main building of the Orange Grove Club. It was like walking through a tropical nursery. Oleander, hibiscus, bougainvillaea, poinciana, and poinsettia, in a fusion of colors, crowded the sides of the path. Oranges and lemons dropped from trees in small well-tended groves. They passed a cluster of cottages similar to their own.

The limestone buildings were painted orange-all but the roofs, which shone soft white in the evening sunlight.

Gail said, “Have you ever seen cleaner roofs?”

“They’d better be clean. That’s what you drink off of.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s no well water on Bermuda, no underground streams, no rivers, no nothing. All the water comes from rain. It runs off the roofs into cisterns.”

“I thought you said it never rains here.”

“What I said was, there’s never been a year with less than three hundred and forty days of some sunshine. It rains a fair amount, even in summer. But the storms are sudden and squally, and they don’t last long.”

“For someone who’s never been here, you’re full of groovy facts.”

“National Geographic training,” Sanders said. “Life is nothing but the pursuit and capture of the elusive fact.”

“Why did you quit the Geographic? Writing for them sounds like it’d be fun.”

“Writing might have been.” Sanders smiled.

“Doing anything might have been. I didn’t do, and I didn’t write. I only made up captions.