Lord of the Deep (8 page)

CHAPTER
10

THE CRYSTAL-C RUMBLED ON.

Alison took her sketchbook and climbed back up onto the flying bridge. Mikey went in and sat in the seat across from Bill. He gazed out over the ocean as they crossed, and crossed again, the great Hawaiian marlin grounds, the seas of massive yellowfin tuna and monster swordfish that some called the best game fish in the world. One of which was lost by Mikey Donovan.

Mikey frowned.

Bill glanced over and winked at him.

Ernie blew his nose, a loud honk. Mikey turned to see him wiping his nostrils with a crumpled handkerchief, pushing his nose to its limits. Mikey turned away.

“Hey, Billyboy,” Ernie said, stuffing the handkerchief back into his pocket.

Bill looked his way.

“How do you make a blonde laugh on Monday morning?”

Bill grinned and looked back toward the sea.

“Tell him, Cal,” Ernie said.

Cal turned around, big grin on his face. “Tell her a joke on Friday.” They both laughed.

Bill shook his head.

Mikey didn’t get it. Were blondes supposed to be dumb, or something? Alison was a blonde, and she wasn’t dumb. These guys were weird.

They trolled parallel to the island, crossing south to north, then south again in long hopeful meanderings. The relentless rumbling engines numbed Mikey’s brain. This was the hardest part, the boredom, the waiting, the endless crawling over waters warmed by a sun that often gave up nothing but scorching burns, salt-cracked lips, and slivers of shade.

Mikey got up and went out onto the stern deck. He leaned against the transom, watching the rods nodding silently to the tug and pull of the lures working in the wake.

As far as Mikey was concerned, the ocean was asleep.

Something hit his back, a wadded-up piece of paper. He turned and picked it up, then glanced at the flying bridge.

Alison waved at him. “Open it,” she mouthed.

Mikey unwadded the paper.
How are you doing?
He looked up at her.

She shrugged and raised her eyebrows.

He gave her a thumbs-up. He was doing fine. Except for thinking about the marlin.

He looked into the cabin.

Cal and Ernie were staring absently out the window. The cards and beer sat untouched on the tabletop between them. Bill held the wheel in loose fingers.

They trolled on.

Mikey was hungry, but since no one else was scrambling for their lunches, he didn’t either.

A while later the sky slowly began to lose its blue to the inevitable afternoon clouding, a blanket of gray white overcast that crept out over the sea from the island. Some parts of the ocean were silver and glary.

Mikey fished a root beer out of the cooler and went back in and stood in the aisle near the wheel. He handed the ice-cold can to Bill.

Bill took it, nodded thanks. He sat with one foot up on the seat, his arm hanging over his knee.

Mikey slid onto the seat across the companionway. He scooted up against the window and sat with his arm on the sill, like you would in a car.

The mountaintops on the island were obscured by clouds now. By five o’clock the sky would be white all the way to the horizon. The sea would be silver gray, and the glare off the water looking west would be nearly unbearable.

CHAPTER
11

CAL AND ERNIE started playing poker again. They said nothing, which was fine with Mikey. There was only the slap of cards hitting the table behind where Mikey sat. The rush of a shuffle every now and then.

Mikey turned in his seat to watch them.

At one point Bill stood and stretched. He pulled the legs of his crumpled shorts down and went back and stood in the aisle near Cal and Ernie. “Nice day, isn’t it?” he said.

“Nice boat ride, you mean?” Ernie said, shooting a sour glance at Mikey.

Mikey looked away.

“That, too,” Bill said.

How does Bill do it? Mikey wondered.

Mikey frowned and got up and went aft, squeezing past Bill. He climbed up to the flying bridge, where Alison was. Maybe from there he could find those birds again, or a log, or even a skid of flotsam—anything that might help locate fish.

Alison sat as before, cross-legged. She was facing aft, looking out over the wake. Her notebook lay open in her lap, the pen in the gully between the pages.

Mikey saw a blip of a boat far out on the horizon. No other boats in sight. Everyone must be fishing farther south today.

“Sit,” Alison said, tapping a spot next to her.

Mikey eased down. “Ever finish that drawing?” Alison’s hand covered the sketchbook.

“I did,” she said.

“Well . . . can I see it?”

“I don’t know . . .”

“Hey, I can’t even draw a stick figure,” Mikey said. “Come on, let me see it.”

“I guess.”

She flipped back a couple of pages and handed the sketchbook to Mikey.

Jeez, Mikey thought.

It looked just like him, but different, too. The face was his, that was for sure. But everything else was sort of out of proportion, larger than real life. It looked perfect that way, though. Grabbed your eyes and wouldn’t let go.

“
You
did this?” he said. Stupidly, he thought, immediately after he’d said it.

“Well, no, actually the pen just flew across the page all by itself. It was a miracle.”

Mikey flipped back through the pages, looking at other drawings. Some were unfinished, some were crossed out, some had notes around them, and some, Mikey thought, were masterpieces. “This is incredible,” he said, then looked up suddenly. “Uh . . . do you mind?”

“You really like them?”

“Are you kidding? This is great stuff.”

“My dad thinks they’re weird . . . because I don’t put everything in proper perspective. He thinks it’s cartoony. But I like it this way.”

Mikey’d been right. There were sketches of Cal all over the place—Cal in the fighting chair, Cal standing in the stern cockpit, Cal smoking a cigar, Cal snoring on the bunk.

There was one Mikey really liked of Bill sitting at the wheel, squinting, a perfect likeness, his arms bigger than life, sharpened by shape and muscle mass. It was as if Alison had looked for some telling detail about him and emphasized that. There was another one of Cal and Ernie playing cards, their hands oversized, the cards like scraps of paper lost in them.

Mikey flipped to the beginning of the sketchbook. There was a girl with a sleek, long-haired cat in her arms. A massive horse and a rider. Cal in a cowboy hat pulled low. A sleeping dog. A woman scrubbing clothes in a wood bucket. Three cowboys branding a calf, the calf’s eyes bulging with fear. A woman saddling a horse, the look on her face one of complete serenity.

“Who’s this?” Mikey asked.

“My mom.”

“I like it. I like all of them. You’re really good, Alison.”

“I want to be an illustrator.”

He handed the sketchbook back. “Can I . . . can I have one? A drawing? If it’s okay?”

She grinned. “Which one?”

“The one of Bill?” He reached over and flipped to the page.

Alison studied it, as if considering if it was good enough to give away. “Sure,” she said. “It’s yours. But I’ll give it to you later. I want to cut it out with a razor so it’s not all ratty.”

“I’m going to frame it.”

“Really? You’d frame it?”

“Of course. Why not?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“You’re okay, you know that?”

“Good Lord, thank you. I was worried.”

Mikey thought he spotted something on the water and stood. There was something that didn’t fit.

An off-color blip.

CHAPTER
12

HE SQUINTED AT IT.

They were trolling back closer to the coastline now, where the undersea ledges were, where the current churned and food was plentiful.

Some kind of debris. A dark spot. Cane trash. Or maybe a log.

“Yes,” Mikey whispered.

He slid down the ladder and grabbed the polarized binoculars and brought them back up. He turned the eyepiece to focus.

Blur, blur. There!

A waterlogged coconut tree is what it looked like. Two or three hundred yards off the port bow.

Alison moved up next to him.

“It’s a coconut tree, I think. Here. Look over there. Keep your eye on it, okay?”

Alison took the binoculars.

Mikey scrambled down and told Bill, and Bill eased the boat that way.

“Bring in one of the outside lines,” Bill said. “Replace it with light tackle.”

“What kind of lure?”

Bill shrugged. “You decide.”

Mikey grinned and ran out to make the change. He chose one of Bill’s homemade jet heads. Thirty-pound test reel. He took the rig out and set it up, put the replaced rod in the rack on the side of the boat. He dropped the jet over the transom and let it free-spool out. What was it Bill said?

Think, think.

The drag. Set it too light and it won’t hammer the hook into the fish. Too tight, the line could snap. You wanted the hook to sink in as the fish runs.

Mikey placed the lure and set the drag where he thought it should be, prayed it should be.

He stood watching the jet work. Now that he was responsible, he understood why Bill spent so long studying the action.

When he was satisfied, Mikey went back in.

Bill didn’t even get up to check it. “Nice job, Mikey. I can tell from here.”

Cal slapped his cards facedown on the table and stretched. “What’s up?” he said, yawning.

“Mikey spotted a log in the water. I had him change one of the long lines to light tackle. Sometimes you can run into a colony of mahimahi around floating debris.”

“Dolphinfish?” Ernie said.

“That’s the one.”

Cal squinted out the window.

Mikey wondered why they weren’t more excited about the log. Floating debris could be an absolute gold mine.

“They don’t get much bigger than fifteen or twenty pounds, do they?” Ernie said.

“Thirty-five or forty is not unusual,” Bill said. “In these waters, anyway. But the males can get bigger than that. World record is eighty-eight, I think. They may not be as popular as marlin, but I’ll tell you this: you can’t find a better fighting fish anywhere in the world. Or a better eating one, either. In my opinion.”

Cal frowned. “The one we lost was a fighting fish. In my opinion.”

Bill nodded. “That it was.”

Ernie rubbed a hand over his mouth. He gnawed his thumbnail, his beer-colored eyes intense. “We tracked a wounded elk for two days over in Utah once,” he said. “Followed the blood.”

“Without a dog, too,” Cal added.

“We finally found it dead in a field of waist-high grass. We don’t like to give up.”

Bill nodded and turned to gaze out over the ocean.

“You’re getting us that marlin, right?” Ernie said. “I mean, we’re not giving up on that, are we?”

“I’ll give you the best I have in me, men.”

Cal
humphed
.

“Well, just you remember,” Ernie said. “We came here for marlin, all right? Swordfish. Don’t waste a lot of our time messing around with this small stuff.”

Bill raised his eyebrows. “It’s your money.”

“Glad we all understand that,” Ernie said.

“But what you don’t understand,” Bill added, “is that marlin like to eat mahimahi, too. Sometimes a log is as good as gold.”

Finally, Mikey thought. Bill’s getting irritated.

But that was it. Cal and Ernie went back to their cards, and Bill stepped back into his mind.

Mikey went back up to see Alison.

They trolled past the log, three light tackle lures and one long line working the wake. Mikey showed Alison the silvery flashes of light beneath the surface as they passed near the log. Silver glimmerings.

“Mahimahi,” he said. “Look. Hundreds of them!”

The Crystal-C passed the log again, then once more. Several fish followed the boat, like porpoises, hugging the hull. “They’re trying to hide,” Mikey said. “Using the boat for protection.”

“From what?”

“Marlin, maybe. Probably.”

Nothing struck the lures.

Mikey dropped back down to see Bill. “What if we stop and chum, drop baited hooks?”

Bill nodded. Said nothing.

“We could cut up the ono.”

“We could,” Bill said.

But Mikey could sense that Bill was hesitant to do that. If the one fish in the fish box was all they were going to catch that day, he’d not want to use it as bait. But if they did use it for bait, they might have a shot at four or five mahimahi, if the conditions were right.

“Let’s get out of here,” Cal said. “Go back to where we hooked the marlin.”

Bill squinted out the window. The ocean was silver from the boat to the island now, with the clouding. “One more pass,” he said. “Then we’ll go.”

Cal pursed his lips. He drained his beer and went out and flipped the bottle into the sea.

How could they talk to Bill as if he were some idiot who didn’t know what he was doing, as if
they
were the experts? Did it really not bother Bill? Or was he boiling over and you just couldn’t see it?

Bill studied the ocean as if Cal hadn’t said a word, as if Bill were in some kind of invisible bubble where insults just bounced away. Mikey thought if someone treated him like that, he’d get angry.

Mikey went back out into the fresh air.

He glanced up at the flying bridge. He could see only the top of Alison’s head.

He turned back and stood at the transom, watching the action of the lures in the wake.

Jumping, bobbing, diving, twirling.

“Come on,” he whispered.

They passed the half-submerged tree one last time. Mikey watched it fade away behind the boat.

The engines vibrated hypnotically in the floorboards.

Mikey’s eyes hooded over.

Bam! Bam!

Two screaming reels jolted him awake.