By Matt McCaskill
I felt the kid’s shoes first, then turned on the light. Black and white high-tops, 18 inches from my face. The dive light wouldn’t penetrate much further than that anyway, so it was easier to grope around the bottom in the 17 feet of abject darkness. The sandy floor of the river was a mess with ubiquitous tangles of fishing line, random cables reaching out from God knows where, and enormous chunks of concrete, making the marked area particularly treacherous and sporty. Holding the down line (a yellow poly rope anchored at either end) in my right hand, my left arm had been outstretched, sweeping in circular motions to avoid a head-to-corpse crash. When I felt ankles and legs leading up from the shoes, a flooding of surprise, relief, and elation all occurred simultaneously. The adrenaline surge was accompanied by a sense of repulsion at the thought of events that led to a 17-year-old at the bottom of the river. I swam over top of the kid and hugged him tightly from behind, as though he were still alive. Once certain that I wouldn’t lose him, I inflated my vest and swam topside of the Waccamaw where we were picked up downstream by a patrol boat. He was 17 and had drowned less than 24 hours earlier. The river did not care.
It all fell into my lap. I mean, does anyone really dream about scuba diving for corpses? A group of officers and I were huddled around a tailgate at the firing range one evening gossiping, talking shit, and waiting on the dark, so we could begin our nighttime qualification course. Barry, a fatality investigator for our agency, stood among us. He was putting together a case file on a duck hunter who had drowned the week before. Seems the poor fellow stepped out of his boat into a hole deep in the vast morass known as Sparkleberry Swamp. A law enforcement diver recovered his body three days later. The details were morbidly interesting, the pictures were graphic, but the story of the dive recovery was utterly fascinating. Barry sensed my rapt attention and stopped mid-sentence.
“Are you interested in the dive team?”
“He sure as hell is,” interrupted my supervisor, who was among the group. “I can see it in his eyes.”
He was right.
The call came late the previous night from Frank, leader of the dive team. This can’t be good.
“We got a bad one on the Waccamaw. I need you in Georgetown at nine o’clock in the morning.”
“I figured. What you got?” I asked while mentally clearing my schedule.
“Boating accident. Five people missing.”
“Damn! Five?”
“Yea. Bad. There’s a Gullah community on an island down there. Most of them don’t have a pot to piss in, and the boats they run look like it. Five or six of them piled up in a boat to go home and got caught in a storm. Boat filled up and sank about 50 yards from the shore. Anyway, pack a bag and plan on being there a while.”
“Yes, Sir. I’ll be there.”
Frank was the kind of guy I couldn’t say no to, and for good reason. He once recovered a drowned three-year-old from a deep mountain lake so that a new father on his team wouldn’t have a hauntingly relatable visual to take home. Such a man deserves loyalty, and he earned mine that day.
I started packing.
Frank wasn’t one to waste time. All the candidates had barely changed clothes and were sitting poolside, awaiting their turn. Day one of dive team tryouts had arrived, and I got called first to occupy one of two chairs facing each other at the far end of the pool.
“You’re gonna have to keep up on all of your regular field work. This is additional duty, not a new job. Is that a problem?”
“No sir.”
“You will get called out at the drop of a hat, for days on end sometimes. Is that a problem?”
“No sir.”
“Are you claustrophobic? You have inner ear problems? Do you get seasick?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“These tryouts will go on for three weeks. Will your schedule allow you to attend every single day?”
“Yes, Sir.”
“You don’t talk much. I like that. Do you have a wife or kids?”
“Yes, Sir. A wife and a daughter.”
“How old?”
“Almost a year.”
He leaned back in his chair, so far it seemed like he would fall in the pool. Then he looked up, wiped his face with his hand, and leaned forward, too close to my face.
“We deal with a lot of bad things here. Plane crashes, murders, boating accidents. Hell, anything and everything. We see dead women and children. Young children, sometimes. You think you could mentally handle all that?”
“Yes, Sir. I think so.”
He smirked.
“Well, don’t worry, son. You’ll know for certain after you find your first one.”
The scene at the river was typical: a goat roping. Cars and trucks were parked everywhere, their diesels idling, red and blue lights flashing. Uniforms scrambled around in every direction, all trying to get the same set of facts. Under the shade of pin oaks, family and friends huddled to the side together, their eyes pleading for any piece of good news that could be spared. I spotted my guys at the end of the dock getting ready to be briefed. The rest of the team had already arrived. When I walked up to the dock, the investigator began:
“Boys, the only good news I have is that we’re down to just one missing now.” It was Barry, who had now become the guy everyone liked but never wanted to see.
“Good Lord. They found four of them already?” I replied excitedly, hoping that I might make it home for my kid’s birthday after all.
The investigator rolled his eyes. “Dude, you know the first story is never right. Two of them made it to the bank way down river. They climbed out, were spotted and picked up just before dark. One body was found last night, and we recovered another body first thing this morning. And you ain’t gonna believe this: there was a baby on board. The momma put the baby on a seat cushion before she drowned. He floated right to the bank. They got him out, and he’s at the hospital right now. They think he’s going to make it. Just like Moses in the Bible.”
“Jesus. That’s crazy.”
“Yep. Anyhow, the last one is a 17-year-old, the baby’s uncle. And we need the boat recovered, too, of course. We have a pretty decent mark, so get your shit on and get in the water.”
The river gave the kid back at the end of the first day.
The game is different now; it’s safer and more efficient. Sonars are the rage, and it’s easy to see why: they search far more bottom than a diver on a rope, and they never run out of air. But there will always be a need for an underpaid, underappreciated, misunderstood diver who is willing to plow through trotlines and ear infections to find whatever he’s told to find.
I’ve since stepped down from the dive team to take a promotion. They tell me that I’m a leader and a planner now. The pay is better, but the education from the river is much more valuable.
Other than his survival, we never heard anything about the baby. The kid undoubtedly has a tough row to hoe. But he has a shot at a good life, and that’s all anybody can ask for. Hopefully, he’s making the most of it.
As for the river: it still doesn’t give a damn.
