The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories (5 page)

Suddenly I felt very much alone and was tempted to wake May up on some pretext or other. But there was nothing I could think of to ask him. Then it occurred to me that even if he were awake he probably wouldn't say anything anyway. I leaned on the sill of the open window. There was no wind and the sky was so blue it seemed to pulsate. The
water had darkened considerably and toward the west looked almost black. The machine-tooled straightness of the horizon was so devoid of even the tiniest irregularity that I found my gaze drifting slowly from one end of the ocean to the other. Actually, there was no need for talking, I thought, at least not out there. My wife and I talked almost all the time. Sometimes we talked all night long. But as I stood there looking for something to see on that empty ocean, I could not remember a single thing we had ever talked about, except possibly our mutual worries over money and even these we hardly ever expressed in so many words. I ate the orange May had given me. Remembering it now, that orange was probably the most succulent and sweetest I'd ever eaten. I lit a cigarette, but since it didn't taste good after the orange I flicked it over the side and watched it swing aft and disappear into the white furrow of the wake.

And then, still looking out over the water, I began to think about the little story of the fisherman and his wife that I had read so often to the children from
Grimm's Fairy Tales
. I pictured the poor fisherman quite clearly, hauling up the big flounder that was an enchanted prince and the flounder saying, “I pray you let me live; what good will it do you to kill me?” When the fisherman returned for succeeding wishes, I remember how the sea had changed from purple and dark blue to gray and was thick, and finally, when he came for his last wish, how the sea came in with black waves as high as church towers and mountains and all with crests of white foam at the top. And thinking about the fairy tale I had read so often made me think of the children and I felt a painful twinge of guilt. And all the while these odd bits of thoughts went through my mind, and the engine pounded, and the
Blue Fin
, rolling slowly,
moved steadily out toward the forty fathom bank, Ethan May slept.

When Pigeon Point was off our port quarter and I could just make out what looked like it might be Año Nuevo Island with its tiny white sliver of a light tower, May got up from the deck of the wheelhouse, put on his black skull cap and looked out through the window. Then he came over by the wheel and, after glancing at the chart, suggested we take a sounding. I threw the engine out of gear, got out the lead line and put some tallow in the cup at the bottom of the lead. As the
Blue Fin
drifted in a slow circle, I put the line down. We were in thirty-eight fathoms, and when I brought the lead aboard, there was green mud on the tallow. May took the wheel and headed west, stopping from time to time, while I took the soundings. When the depth showed forty fathoms and green sand was on the tallow, May went aft and let out the buoy line.

I used to believe that time would efface certain memories, or at least take the pain out of them. I see now that this was wishful thinking. Time passes and things change. Outwardly I'm no longer what I was. I eat too much, gain weight. I've gotten soft, lost my hair. My wife, who was once quite shapely, is troubled by a figure problem. Her hair has turned gray. Time passes and things change. But, for the most part, they're happy changes. We do not talk all night as we once did. We come and go pretty much as we please. Healthy love exists between us all, a tranquil kind of love engendered by the freedom from anxiety that springs from the security of affluence.

But these doubts, these ugly shadows. They skulk about. I wait but they do not go away. And then one moment off guard, one little rift, and a whole scene appears before me. It is mid-afternoon, cool, bright with a moving shadow under the lee of the
Blue Fin
's rust-mottled hull. I feel a slow rolling, driving forward, hear the prolonged S sound of the bow wake, the ominous hiss of the up-flung shark hooks. Ethan May's sturdy figure stands framed against the sky. After twenty years, this scene, and one other, cling obstinately, at times obsessively, defying altogether the effacing power of time, and every effort of will.

We were a good five miles offshore. The white sand beaches had sunk below the rim of ocean. Faintly, I could see the broken segments of yellow cliffs extending to the north and south and out of sight. Long hills, round and brown and parted here and there by wide hazy valleys,
faded back into the dim gray peaks of the coastal ranges. The smell of land seemed far away. Over the stern roller, the heavy mainline, with its sardine pendants like silver ornaments, descending at a steep angle and disappearing far below the watery darkness, made me acutely conscious of the eerie depths below. At that moment I had but one desire, and that was not for sharks—I'd given up all hope by then—but to be back in the City, back with my wife and the children, however impoverished we might have been, however dismal the future might have looked.

When the set was down and the last buoy line was out, we went below for a bite to eat and some hot coffee. As always, May sluiced down the deck, washed his hands, and after folding his black skull cap and putting it into his trouser pocket, followed me into the galley. Nothing seemed to disturb him. The fact that all the other boats had gone, that we had gotten almost nothing on our first set, that we were now far out on the ocean and completely alone with the end of the season almost on us, all of which had put me into a state close to despair, seemed to affect him not at all.

Nor could I tell how he felt about the gull getting hooked that morning. I could only assume that he took that too, like everything else, as a matter of course. He ate the big salami sandwich I put on the table with obvious relish. And when we had finished our coffee, he settled back for a while with his pipe. Shortly he got up.

“We'd better pick up the line,” he said. “It'll be dark soon.”

“You think there'll be anything on it?” I asked in a voice that must have shown my nervousness.

“Well, I hope there'll be,” he said in his slow soft voice. “We just do the best we can.”

I started up the engine and headed the
Blue Fin
back
alongside the first marker. May pulled the keg and the pole aboard and the set line followed. I leaned out of the wheelhouse window and squinted down into the water watching as it came up from the bottom. I could see the line bending away into the clear blue darkness and a few bare hooks swinging on the ganions from the taut manila. Then from out of the depths I could see the long, gray-brown body of a soupfin emerge slowly into the underwater sunlight. Further down was another. I jumped back to the wheel, cut the engine to an idle and headed the boat along the line. Then I grabbed a gaff and pulled the shark up onto the deck.

I don't remember how long it took to get the set in, but I remember that it got dark and that either May or I turned on the deck light. Beyond that there was a weird, dreamlike quality about everything, the white light overhead, the quick liquid reflections on the black water, the irregular sput and gurgle of the underwater exhaust, some dim stars rotating in drunken circles and the feel of the steel gaff driving into hard live flesh. And there were strange sounds like grunts and sighs, at once human and unearthly, of fleshy turning and twisting, of the fleshy thud of the axe head, the squeak of rubber boots on blood, the impotent slapping and bumping of heavy bodies from the black hold. Yet through the delirium of twisting, sighs and thumpings, the unreality of steel in live flesh, black blood glistening, the thick ammonia stench rising and all enacted in that disk of hard light entombed in night sea darkness, a part of my mind, with machine-like accuracy, was counting . . . one two . . . two . . . two . . . three . . . four . . . five . . . five . . . five . . . six . . . 
until finally four hundred and eighteen . . . four hundred and eighteen. It was not until I had stumbled into the wheelhouse and scratched the number on a corner of the chart that I came up out of the depths of what
seemed an evil, exalting trance and, clinging to the wheel, breathing heavily, I felt for the first time the burning in my back and in my arms and down through my thighs.

When I heard the hollow thump of the buoy keg on the deck, I turned up the throttle and, still in a daze, headed the
Blue Fin
east toward land. For quite some while I could hear May moving about and then the splashing of water as he sluiced down the deck. Presently he was standing beside me, folding his black skull cap preparatory to putting it into his trouser pocket. On his clean tanned face I could detect a slight flush that might have been excitement. But there was no fatigue, no sign of weariness. He could well have just finished a brisk morning walk the way he quietly filled his pipe.

“We can lay in behind Año Nuevo,” he said. “It's a rocky bottom but your big kedge anchor will hold all right.”

He lit his pipe and the sweet, sharp smell of tobacco filled the wheelhouse. “You go below and rest a bit,” he said, and taking the wheel swung it over so that the three quick flashes that were the Año Nuevo Island light came up over the
Blue Fin
's bow. “Thanks,” I mumbled, embarrassed by my evident exhaustion, but happy to stretch out for a few minutes. “Thanks a lot.”

Below, the heavy stench of the sharks had already begun to penetrate the galley and the forward cabin. I lay down on one of the bunks and closing my burning eyes began immediately to calculate mentally the weight of the sharks. From what I had heard the males averaged forty-five pounds, the females sixty. Figuring at fifty pounds per shark, it would take a hundred and twenty or more sharks to make three tons. A warm glow spread through my aching limbs. There were more than three times that many sharks in the hold. Five thousand dollars! Five thousand
four hundred dollars! And a hundred dollars added for expenses. Fifty-five hundred dollars. At twenty-five dollars a week, that would be two years, three years . . . no, more than four years . . .

I fell into a quick troubled sleep in which fragmental events of the day appeared in garbled, shadowy disorder. Clouds of small speckled gulls descended on the
Blue Fin
and were tearing great hunks of flesh out of some enormous sharks that squirmed on the deck and snapped their huge jaws. A giant gull with gleaming silver armor plate on its breast and giant black-tipped wings had lifted one of the sharks so that it was suspended full length in the air. A long, thin snake was coiled in one of the tubs. Its flat triangular head rested on the tub's rim. A red barbed hook darted in and out of its mouth. And in the middle of all this, his face smeared with chocolate, May lay stretched out on the hatch cover, sound asleep in the dark sunlight.

When I woke up the
Blue Fin
was rolling slowly. The engine was stopped and I could hear the anchor chain grinding in its iron chock. May was in the galley cooking something on the Primus stove. He had opened all the ports but, despite the cool breeze and the bulkheads that separated the sharks in the hold from the cabin, the smell was almost too much. I got up feeling dizzy and a little sick to my stomach. May was making up a Joe's Special he had put together from odds and ends—eggs, canned spinach, onions, some leftover rice—he had found in the ice box. A pot of coffee was just coming to a boil. The smell of the food cooking and the good smell of the coffee made me feel better. I got out the folding table, then went up on deck to look around.

The
Blue Fin
was anchored a few hundred yards to the lee of what looked in the bright starlight like a long low island with some dimly lighted buildings toward one end. The light tower was invisible, but at intervals of about a minute a brilliant white beam near the center of the island illuminated the darkness, eclipsed, flashed twice more, then eclipsed again. To the north of the island I could make out the vague white line where swells broke over a long reef. The low rumble of water, though close by, seemed far away. Either I had gotten used to the shark stench or the little night breeze had dissipated it. Suddenly I thought of all the sharks in the hold and again a pleasant, warm tingling spread through my chest. Ever since we had started pulling the set a strange dreamlike quality had pervaded everything. Now as I stood there on the
Blue Fin
's deck
with the night sea sounds around, the chuckle of a lone gull, the low booming surf, the sharp sweeping cry of a kill-deer, the quiet lap of water, and above, the unbelievable brilliance of the November sky, the happy reality of it all began to come through to me. From the bottom of my mind, the magic number fifty-five hundred kept repeating itself, rhythmically, like a drum beat or a pulsing heart.