Benchley, Peter

Benchley, Peter by The Deep [txt]

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“Nobody’d be fool enough to come in here after it, and it’s for sure no dizzy bugger’s going to knock me down and try to rifle my pockets.” He moved to the gate. “Be sure you want to do this. You’re on holiday. There’s no reason for you to muck about with this if you’d rather not.”
    “What could happen?” Gail asked.
    “I imagine nothing. But you’re never sure what people will do when they smell money. Especially some of the black bastards around here.”
    Treece noticed that Gail started at the words “black bastards” and he said, “Racist.
    Prejudiced bugger. Fascist. No. I have no prejudice. But I do have my biases. And my reasons. The blacks on Bermuda have ample to complain about, and they do ample complaining. But they’ve got a way to go before they earn my respect.”
    “But you can’t-was
    “Come on,” Sanders said, cutting her off. “Let’s not turn this into a symposium on ethnic attitudes.” He said to Treece, “See you tomorrow.”
    “Good.” Treece opened the gate for them and shut it after them. As soon as the gate was closed, the dog reared up on her hind legs, put her front paws on the fence, and began snarling and barking.
    Treece laughed. “You’re tourists again.”
    They walked their motorbikes down the hill toward the road in front of the lighthouse.
    “We
    should
    be sure we want to do this,” Gail said.
    “I’m
    sure. What an opportunity to
    do
    something. I’m sick of reading about what other people have done or writing about other people’s good times. You can’t live your whole life vicariously. It’s like masturbating from cradle to grave. Anyway, all we’ve agreed to do is dive tomorrow, which we want to do anyway, and see what’s there. If we find anything-then we can worry about what to do next. But I’m not walking away from this before we know more.”
    When David Sanders was seventeen, a junior in high school, his English class had been assigned Walden.
    Most of Sanders’ classmates found the book dull and lifeless, a collection of maxims to be underlined, memorized, regurgitated on an exam
    paper, and forgotten.
    But Sanders had found Thoreau’s attitudes toward life so inspiring that he had two plaques made.
    One said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”; the other:
    “… I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Though they had chipped and faded with time, the plaques still hung over his desk.
    When he was a junior in college, Sanders went to a lecture by Jacques-Yves Cousteau, and by the end of the evening he knew that Cousteau’s was the life he wanted to live. He wrote letters to Cousteau (none was ever answered) and drove two hundred miles or more to hear Cousteau lecture and see one of his films. Once, after a lecture, he had spoken to Cousteau, who told him-graciously but firmly-that there were hundreds of applicants for positions aboard the
    Calypso
    and that unless Sanders had credentials as a marine scientist or underwater photographer, he had no chance of being considered.
    Immediately after graduating, Sanders entered the Army’s six-month program. When his active duty was over, he married the girl he had been dating since his sophomore year. He didn’t particularly want to get married, but, now that it was obvious that he would have to seek routine employment, Sanders thought of marriage as an adventure: at least it was something he had never done before.
    David and Gloria moved to Washington. The romance of Camelot was in full flower, and David fancied himself in the Kennedy style. He swam, sailed, played touch football. He even brought with him a letter of recommendation from one of his history professors who had been a classmate of JFK’S at Harvard. He thought he might become a
    speech writer-junior, of course-sitting at Ted Soren-son’s right hand,

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