Three men were sitting in a bar outside the main gate of the Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center. It was a glaring summer afternoon on the Florida Panhandle, and tourists had fled from the beaches into hotels, movie theaters or bars. But The Ten Foot Stop was not for them; it was a low concrete roadhouse with a tin roof that had served military divers and trainees for many years. Thousands of their faces, indistinguishable in miniature, looked down from the walls in fly-specked class photos that started in black-and-white and moved on to faded color. The Stop was otherwise bare of ornament to the concrete floor. It served cold beer and several types of liquor, including the improbable ones that men dared each other to drink, and had two pool tables, and a trivia machine on one end of the bar. At night the drinks were served by a pretty redhaired waitress who wasn't as young as returning graduates remembered, but it was okay because the bartender said she was talking about marrying a former customer and moving on to better things.

The three men had been deep-sea divers, and each had made excuses to business or family to visit The Stop to confirm that this past had been real and not a dream, because it all seemed so improbable. Two of them were beyond middle-age; the third could have been either of their sons. They had come looking for active-duty divers or trainees at the school but had arrived too early on a weekday and met each other instead.

The Challenger," the former Coast Guard lifer said a few minutes into the conversation, as if introducing himself a second time. He was a thick man with a crew cut who had left the service 15 years earlier, without retirement benefits, on the gamble that he could make his fortune in salvage. He did own a small wrecking company kept afloat by his mother-in-law, who believed him when he said he could refloat hulks stuck in the tidal flats of Central America, tow them to Galveston and scrap them for profit.

"January 28, 1986," the former Coastie said. "Atlantic coast. We had everybody involved in the shuttle recovery, from NOAA to the FBI. There was a push on to catch as many of the pieces as possible before they were swept away in the Gulf Stream. Once they drop off the Continental Shelf, that's it. And that was some rough water. Lots of current."

"Were you actually in the water on that one, or were you topside?" The former Army diver had left the army to profess his faith in Jesus with an organization called The Way. It was just as well; his secret shame was that he had been a clumsy diver inept at working with his hands. His supervisor had said that when he dove he looked like two polar bears fucking under a blanket. Both had laughed uproariously, but it had hurt. It hurt. Now he sold children's Bibles for a Christian publishing company.

"Was I in the water? I was the first diver to get wet," the salvor said. "Fourteen dives, all hardhat, four of them decompression dives. I may not have gotten much out of being in the service, but when my grandchildren ask, 'Where were you the day the shuttle blew up?' I can say by god I helped recover it."

"Let me ask you something," the Bible salesman said. "Was that shuttle in big pieces when it hit the water, or was it really blown into little bits?"

"We used a 100-ton crane to pull some of it off the ocean floor."

"Is it true the crew survived the explosion? They say there were tapes of them screaming on the way down. The government wouldn't release them because it was too disturbing. But were they alive when they hit the water?"

"I couldn't say."

The Bible salesman grinned. He drank the last of his scotch and motioned for more. He liked sweet drinks, but scotch looked better in the hand of a man his age, especially at The Stop.

"You mean you don't know if they were alive when they hit the water, or are you saying that you can't tell us what you do know?"

"I'm saying I can't say," the first said. He drank knowingly.

"Oh man, that's fucked up," the salesman said.

"What's your story, Hero?" the salvor asked the Bible salesman. He was neither sincere nor interested; asking was his reward to the other man.

The Bible salesman said that he had been decorated for retrieving the most bodies by an Army diver after Air Florida Flight 90 crashed in the Potomac on January 13, 1982.

"Is that the one where the guy swam out to save a woman in all that ice?" asked the salvor.

"That's it. Whole thing dumped into the river right after takeoff. Hit a bridge full of commuters first."

"Must have been pretty grisly," the salvor said. He took a long pull on his beer and smacked his lips.

"There were a lot of people still strapped in their seats. Kids, too. I have kids myself." The salesman was silent as he looked up at the dirty skylight, pretending he was underwater and that it was a floodlight on a barge overhead. He tried to recall some emotion.

"Hey," he said. "The captain of Flight 90 came on the intercom shortly after takeoff. 'Folks, this is your captain speaking,' he said. 'I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that drinks are free on today's flight.' All the passengers cheered. Then the captain said, 'The bad news is we'll be making an unscheduled stop for ice and water.'"

The Bible salesman laughed at his own joke. "Seriously, it was bad. The cabin was full of floating junk. A lot of stuff from carry-on bags. Miles of wiring, shattered glass. Pieces of bodies," he said.

The three listened to crows walking the ridge of the tin roof in the heat.

"Well, fuck them too," the salvor said. "Right? Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke. What about you, Navy? They stick you out on ships where it's too deep to work. Then some destroyer gets cable around its screw. They put three divers over the side. Two of them get tangled in it, unbeknownst to the one cutting it off with a torch, and when it falls free it drags them 16 miles to the ocean floor. The bodies are never found."

"Coast Guard and Army are brown-water divers," the salesman said proudly. "We work for a living." He and the salvor high-fived.

They looked at the former Navy diver, who had been quiet too long, and when he began to speak, they gratefully drank.

"After graduation," he said, "I was berthed on a carrier, and you're right: I didn't dive much. And because I wasn't getting wet, I wasn't comfortable in deep water any more. I grew up in the Midwest. What'd I know about squalls and all that?"

"Most work is in the first 60 feet of water," the salesman said.

"But there was always the threat that I might be called to dive," the former Navy diver said. "I started to think about Master Chief Coughlin at dive school. He used to stand with a cup of coffee in his hand while the other cadre were dogging us, and he'd ask, 'If you're ever on a ship that sinks out from under you in the middle of an ocean, how long will you be able to stay afloat before you're rescued?'

"We knew it was meant to be about endurance. We were lying there dripping sweat, in pain, but no matter what our answer was—eight hours we'd stay afloat, we said; a day; three days; a week we could stay afloat, catching fish by hand and sucking their blood; 14 years and I'd marry a fish, some guy said—it was never what he wanted to hear, and he'd tell them to punish us even worse.

"He asked, and he asked, and we kept getting stronger. Anything seemed possible. One day we did three hours of PT in the morning, water drills all afternoon, then that night I swam two miles and ran five, got drunk on the beach, danced 'til the place closed, screwed some girl five times—the first one alone a solid hour—drove back to the base and started all over again with no sleep.

"Okay, okay, I'm just telling you," he said when the other two started to protest. "One day near graduation the Chief finally told us the secret. We were in the pool in uniform and boots, treading water using only our feet and holding lead weights in the air over our heads.

"'Do you want to know how long you will stay afloat if a ship goes out from under you in the middle of any ocean?' he asked. 'Until you can wade ashore.'

"He gave us the answer to the riddle only after we were ready to believe it. And I believed, but it filled me with a different kind of dread. In nightmares, I had to cut the grass in a meadow that stretched across a valley and up to a treeline several miles away, with a pair of scissors. I would wake up nauseous from the size of the job and the need to muster that kind of energy and patience. It was impossible and pointless."

The salvor and the salesman listened but fidgeted and peeled labels off bottles.

"After a year as a fleet diver, I got promoted and was assigned to the Grasp. It was the Grasp and the Grapple you saw on TV recovering Flight 800, off Montauk. My first week on-board, JFK, Jr.'s plane disappeared between Jersey and Martha's Vineyard. We steamed up from Little Creek, and they woke us up at midnight to tell us they had something on sidescan sonar. The ROV confirmed it. I was hoping somebody else would make that dive, but it didn't turn out that way."

"Goddamn, son," the salvor said. He had drained a beer and ordered a sandwich in the time the former Navy diver had spoken. "You mean to tell me all this lead-up was to get to the fact that you're the guy that found that boy's body? Good for you. But you need some work on your story.

"Look, here's a story: There used to be an old petty officer who came in here to drink, back when I was in First Class school. He had had the head of his dick pierced and a ring put through it, with a gold chain attached to that. On the other end of that chain was a little golden anchor. He'd come over here to The Stop after he was done working for the day, climb up on his usual stool, unzip his drawers, pull out the chain and throw the anchor up on the bar. 'Tommy,' he'd say, 'keep 'em coming. I'm moored for the night.'"

The Bible salesman laughed at that and said he knew a good one about a woman so wild that she bit some guy's asshole, but the salvor said he was an idiot too; how do you bite a hole? The Bible salesman giggled at being shot down, and he tried again with the one about the Medal of Honor winner who went crazy at The Stop one night, which all of them knew, and the one about the guy who used to lie under a specially-built table with a plastic baggie in his mouth. All this served as intermission in the former Navy diver's story, and after the other two settled down, he continued with their full attention and interest, because now he would tell them an experience they could tell others.

"We were seven miles off the beach in 116 feet of water," he said. "The media had been ordered to stay five miles from us, but we'd go below and there was the ship on TV, shot with a long lens from some invisible plane. Some of the crew took turns going up on deck so they could watch each other on CNN. There was a lot of pressure to get the job done fast and right. They said the President was watching, and that the family was the nearest thing we had to royalty. That was when the senator and his two sons showed up. We had some nervous laughter on-station, and I had to talk two line tenders out of dropping their shorts for the camera's benefit. But deep down we knew what was at stake. I was going to run the comms, but somebody had an ear squeeze from another dive, and somebody else had a cold, and so on. I was feeling green with the stench of diesel, and the beam on the Grasp is much narrower than a carrier's, so it rock-and-rolls in any kind of swell. In the end I knew it would be a lot calmer under the water than on it, so Pat Rawlins and I got suited up. As the winch let the stage out, the ship rolled over to port and dropped us fast into the water, up to our chests and off-balance. Then the ship rolled starboard and we were pulled completely free and had to hold on with the water trying to pull us and our gear off the stage. Finally they sunk us past the wave surge, but even then I was breathing as if this was my last breath, or this, so I cracked the valve open and let air freeflow through the helmet until bubbles were chugging hard out the exhaust, and after a minute or so I felt better. At that depth, we only had 15 minutes. Pat stayed on the stage and tended my hose. I leaned way forward to hurry up but fell slowly into each step and was bouncing off the bottom the harder I pushed. The vis was only about eight feet. I almost hit my head on the wreck, which was upside-down and stripped of wings and prop. I found him before I did the others. It wasn't weird anymore, and I wasn't scared. It was almost peaceful. It was ... an honor to be the one to rescue him."

"Recover. When it's a body, you recover, not rescue," said the salvor.

"Recover, whatever," the former Navy diver said. "I'll remember it the rest of my life."

"Gross, huh?" the salesman said. His eyes gleamed.

"No, not that. I'll remember it because ... ." He stopped, elbows supporting his weight on the bar, purposely avoiding the others' eyes. "I'll remember it because it's the best thing I've ever done," he said.

"Oh, come on. It's not like he was president," the salvor said. "He had nothing to do with any of our lives. A cocksure kid pretending to be a pilot, who didn't have the sense to stay home that night. Got his wife and sister-in-law killed too."

The salesman glanced at him nervously. "It's true; they say he shouldn't have flown that night, but I have to disagree on the rest. He meant something to this country. At least his family does. I think of John-John, I think of him saluting his poor dead daddy."

"Exactly," the salvor said. "You remember nothing. You feel sorry for him because you want to feel like a victim. That day you're thinking of was about Jack Kennedy, the image that JFK built up and how we felt like something was snatched away from us, when it was a direct result of his foreign policy, or because he slept with somebody's girlfriend. But that boy had nothing to do with it. Jackie was the one ordered him to salute. Oh, boy. It's so sad he died in a tragic plane crash. But all he did was publish a fruity magazine."

"The family's cursed, you know," said the salesman. "That's what they say. Joe, the old man, sold his soul to the devil. How else was an Irishman and Catholic going to get ahead?"

The former Navy diver said, "All of it meant something to my mom. She cut out those photos in Look of him peeking out from under the desk in the Oval Office. I thought of that when I was down there."

"That was Life, not Look," the salvor said. "You aren't old enough to remember. So I suppose that boy's death was a turning point for your generation?" he mocked.

"It was important to me. I'll always be glad I did something."

The salvor tried to sound disinterested. "You did what to who, now?"

"I don't know. Nothing. I didn't plan anything. But I was the only one there ... ."

The salvor seemed to grow angry. "What did you do?" he said, too loudly.

The salesman turned to one and then the other. "What is it?"

"This guy ... . You better not have done anything funny down there!"

"No, no. It wasn't a joke or anything like that. It was just this moment. I don't know. I needed to say something."

"What are you, a minister? The guy was dead three days. What could you possibly have to say?"

"Maybe it was for me. It sounds dumb now. But I couldn't do it with my helmet on, because they would have heard me talking up on the ship."

"I don't believe this guy," the salvor said. "Who gave you the right?"

"Nobody. I just thought ... . He was never in the military. And here was this Navy ship prying into things, and the Coast Guard, FBI, NTSB, everybody looming overhead. All he wanted to do was build his own life, and it didn't seem right to do this thing like it was just another naval exercise."

"What did you do?" said the Bible salesman. "Pray?"

The salvor snorted.

The younger man said, "I reached back and popped the clasp on the collar, took a couple of deep breaths, and pulled my helmet off. Of course when that cold water hit my ear I got some vertigo, and I couldn't see a thing."

"This guy is full of more shit than a Christmas goose," the salvor said. "You did not go and pull your helmet off in 130-feet of silty water to talk to a corpse. With the whole country watching? Bull. Shit. There's no reason to it."

"I don't know," the salesman said. "I can remember the day Elvis died. It was bad for me to see The King brought down. I had my wife and girls kneel with me and say a few words, but it didn't help much. It was like after a natural disaster."

The salvor laughed at him.

"It seemed like life might become pointless," the salesman whined.

"Maybe yours has been pointless," the salvor said.

The salesman pretended to be sad. "It's been a little more lonesome than it had to be." He mimicked Elvis and crooned into his glass, "Are you lonesome, tonight? Are you lonesome, tonight. ... "

The salvor stopped him with a playful slap to the back of the head.

The salesman laughed at being struck, and the salvor shoved the side of his head again with his fingertips. Before the salvor could touch him a third time, the salesman reminded him of his objections to the former Navy diver's story.

"If you pulled your helmet off, wouldn't your suit flood?" the salesman said. "Sure, water would pour right in, and you'd be too heavy to climb back on the stage."

"Now wait a minute," the salvor said, instantly turning on his ally. "It's a drysuit. The neckdam holds water out whether the hat is on or not."

"Yeah, until all the air rushed out."

"You don't know anything. Even if the suit floods, you roll your gloves down and blow water out through the cuffs when you put the Superlite back on."

The salvor and the salesman argued until they ran out of objections.

"I still don't get it," the salvor said.

"I guess I can understand," the salesman said, uncomfortable and ready to make peace. "It's like taking your hat off and saying a few words out of respect."

"No, it wasn't like that," the former Navy diver said.

"If it had been somebody important," the salvor said. "I don't know. Sinatra."

"You never told us what you said to him," the salesman said.

"Forget about it," the salvor said. "I told you, the Navy doesn't do real work. Look, Army. Let me tell you about my days as a copper-collar worker in the harbor at Cam Ranh. The old Mark V rigs? That was hardhat diving."

The salesman, grateful to be chosen, leaned closer but glanced worriedly now and then at the younger man.

The former Navy diver finished his warm beer and shot the remains of someone else's pool game with a warped cue. There was no cue ball, so he used the Three until he scratched it in a corner pocket, and it fell into the locked innards of the table. When he left, the glare at the door was like that from an arc-welder, and it left an aura in the others' vision. They looked away from the door and its view of the long stretch of hot, crushed gravel in the lot. Across the wavering road was the guard shack at the main gate of the Navy diving school, where they had all trained as young men, regardless of military branch, and knew that if they survived the training they'd be invincible.

"Fucking guy," the salvor said. "Telling stories. Probably wasn't even a diver. Just wanted us to think he was."

"Could have learned all that from TV," the salesman said.

"Closest he ever got to a Kennedy was the dollar in his pocket."

They sat in the companionable silence of having met their obligation to The Ten-Foot Stop, that is to say, their pasts. But the Bible salesman was uneasy that it had not gone smoothly. He thought it was probably the liquor, and he vowed to Jesus and his absent wife, left in a Holiday Inn with their children, that he wouldn't drink scotch again until he had to go to a wedding reception or some other public event.

The salvor was vaguely aware that he may have been too hard on the young man, and he didn't want the salesman to leave with the wrong impression.

"That Kennedy boy was handsome, though, wasn't he?" he said. "Better than Jack and Bobby's girls."

"Oh, yeah," the salesman said, relieved to get the conversation going. "Their features look better on a man. Of course, Jackie was a good-looking woman."

"Well, she wasn't a Kennedy, was she?"

The lies they swapped kept them at The Stop for another two hours, long enough for both to get as drunk as they had ever been in the old days, which seemed important. As they got in their cars to drive back to their hotels, the salvor remembered one more thing. He flagged the salesman down.

"Now that Princess Di, that was a shame," he said. "My wife bawled the night she died. I said, 'What the hell are you waking me up for? I can't do anything about it. Get some sleep.' But I'll tell you one damn thing: I wouldn't have kicked her out of bed for eating crackers."