The Southseas

"They walked up the road together to the old man's shack and went in through its open door. The old man leaned the mast with its wrapped sail against the wall and the boy put the box and other gear beside it. The mast was nearly as long as the one room of the shack." –Old Man and the Sea

"What did you find down there," the granddaughter said, bobbing in her small kayak now to a new ripple of waves made by boats slipping past the southern end of the Caya.  

"I don't know for sure," he said, too enthusiastic in his stomach to reveal what he thought he might have found.  To all treasure hunters, he now felt, it must be entirely something else to actually find what you are looking for.  How to proceed, who to tell?

"Yes, we should lift our soft anchors, shouldn't we?" he said, lifting his mask.  "One more time down, so I can get a clearer view. Here, hold this." He handed her a wide white shell that he had pulled from the dust of the bottom.  She took it from him and held it upward to the sun which was now at mid afternoon and hot enough to seemingly dry the droplets of seawater on contact.  As she lifted it, the old man remembered all the people just beyond at the pool and the waterpark, at the Land's End rooms and the Seabreeze room, the men playing golf at the short course and all the people laying at the Sunset Beach.  Here there were, in the middle of all of this, on top of Spanish treasure ship.  The water picked him upward then down again as the ship traffic moved by at low wake.  He took a deep breath and quickly arrowed down to the shallow bottom where he cupped his hand around the wooden posts and scooped away. He followed the line of the side of the vessel and it carried him fifty feet at least, too far to hold the breath and he had edged along the bottom to a deeper point. The ship was tilted as the ocean floor hear had created a naturally deepening channel. He used his feet to spring up from the wooden planking and quickly lifted up over the surface. The grandmother would not believe this story and he wondered how he would tell it.