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.They release the heater, then wait to make sure their bubble does not escape and rise to the surface.“We’re good,” Rays says.They silently pass the bag of weights, filling their pockets, stringing their belts.Ray uncurls the clothesline to tether them together.They stand at the edge of the barge.Bosco grins.“Last time we’ll have to—” he starts to say, before Ray leaps into the river, sinking fast, moved by the current.He feels the rope tighten, Bosco pulled in behind him.He settles in the gravel and mud.The water is clearer than usual, a light, murky gold.He walks until the heater looms up in his vision, white and blurry.He gives the two quick tugs on the rope and Bosco soon finds him.They work out from the heater in their long spokes.It is slow today, only a few oysters under their rakes.When it is time they lift the heater and Bosco strains, holding it while Ray slips underneath.The darkness of it always startles him, like instant blindness.He hears himself pant for breath, runs his fingers around the mossy sides.He holds his head in his hands, squeezes, breathes.Ray taps the side of the heater and Bosco lifts it to let him out.Ray takes it from him to allow Bosco inside.Just before he slips under, Bosco holds up the diamond and gives Ray a thumbs-up.His face is drawn, desperate, searching Ray’s eyes.He slips down and in.Without the money he will die, and without Ray he will not have the money.He believes in everything that Ray is to him, just as he believes that bullshit and stupid jokes are equal to cancer, that killing is some easy thing.He pulls his faith from TV shows.They are moving toward the things he believes in now, he is pulling Ray toward them, toward the explosion of brain and hair and blood, toward the shining box of diamonds.In the dark water and the throbbing of his lungs the scene repeats itself like memory.Bosco taps the side of the heater.He will reemerge, his eyes panicked and full of death.The taps on the heater grow louder—sharper and more distinct—and Ray realizes that Bosco is tapping with the diamond.The clicks resonate like gunshots through some distant wall, mixed in the noise of his pulse in his ears, of the slow push of water.He shakes his head, his lungs aching already, too soon, way before his time in the heater.His chest burns, the taps coming in sharp ripples of sound as his fingers work at the knotted rope around his waist, at the belt of weights holding him down.He unties them and rises slightly, Bosco’s voice shouting from a thousand miles away as Ray twists the hot water valve atop the heater, letting in the water, the bubbles rising fat and bright, moving upward as the taps of the diamond quicken and then slow, as Ray gives himself to the current, following the bubbles, his lungs strained to bursting, his eyes held by a patch of greasy light above him.He rises, flailing through moments, as if all he could know of what would come next and next were held above him always, just beyond reach, in a layer of thin white air.About the AuthorBRAD BARKLEY, a native of North Carolina, is the author of two novels, Alison’s Automotive Repair Manual, which was a Book Sense 76 choice, and Money, Love, which was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and a Book Sense 76 choice.Money, Love was named one of the best books of 2000 by the Washington Post and Library Journal.Book magazine named Barkley as one of their Newcomers of 2002: Breakthrough Writers You Need to Know.His short fiction has appeared in over two dozen publications, including USA Today, the Raleigh News & Observer, the Southern Review, the Georgia Review, the Oxford American, the Greensboro Review, Glimmer Train, Book magazine, and the Virginia Quarterly Review, which has twice awarded him the Emily Balch Prize for Best Fiction.He has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, once earning Special Mention, and was short-listed in Best American Short Stories, 1997, and again in 2002.His work is anthologized in New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2002.He has won four Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.Brad Barkley teaches creative writing at Frostburg State University.He lives in western Maryland with his wife, Mary, and two children.The Dzanc Books eBook ClubJoin the Dzanc Books eBook Club today to receive a new, DRM-free eBook on the 1st of every month, with selections being made from Dzanc Books and its imprints, Other Voices Books, Black Lawrence Press, Keyhole, Disquiet, and Starcherone.For more information, including how to join today, please visit http://www.dzancbooks.org/ebook-club/
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