The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories (2 page)

Of course, the news of such generosity spread quickly and it was soon discovered that the buyer for Acme had, and for no other reason than pure curiosity, sent samples of shark liver to the government laboratory for analysis. The results showed the Vitamin A concentrate to be sixteen times greater than that of a prime cod. Furthermore, a report from the State Bureau of Fisheries disclosed that the soupfin's liver averaged something like fifteen percent of the fish's entire body weight! Overnight the price shot up to fifty dollars. By the end of November when the sharks disappeared for the winter, they were bringing seventy-five dollars per ton.

Naturally, the big question in everyone's mind was whether or not they were going to stay at seventy-five. There was much talk around the Wharf. Some speculated it might go up to one hundred; others were convinced it was a result of war hysteria and that by spring when the sharks showed up again, they'd be down to their original nothing. But even the most pessimistic, I noticed, were laying in coils of quarter-inch manila line. And there was a sudden shortage of shark hooks in all the supply houses.

Here was my chance, I thought. With spring over four months away, I'd have plenty of time to get ready. I talked to my wife.

“Isn't it dangerous?” she asked.

“No more so than taking out parties,” I replied, though at the time, I had almost no idea of what was involved.

“We sure could use the money,” she said, plaintively.

There was no doubt about that, I thought, and began immediately to make plans for converting the
Blue Fin
to shark fishing. I checked the other boats, talked to fishermen, made sketches of the
Blue Fin
's deck and hold. I even sent away to the National Bureau of Fisheries for all
the available literature on sharks, their breeding and migratory habits.

It turned out to be a bigger job than I had thought. The equipment was expensive. The power gurdy that was needed to pull in the fish would have cost more than three hundred dollars. There were coils of manila line to be bought, several thousand hooks plus anchors and floats and hard twist cotton for leaders or ganions as they're called. Any one of a dozen fish buyers would have financed me, I knew. But what if the price of sharks went down to nothing again, I wondered anxiously. What if the boat were impounded for debt?

Winter came on with its week-long rains interspersed with southwest gales that whipped the ocean to a foaming frenzy. Except for some net mending between storms and the usual fleet of intrepid little crab boats that went chunking out in the two
A.M
. blackness, the Wharf was deserted. Beneath the enervating cover of cold gray skies, the autumn vision of sudden riches from shark livers and Vitamin A soon faded.

The first boat to catch any sharks the following spring was the
Viking
with two men aboard, Karl Hansen and his brother Jon. They had been fishing on Cordell Bank, which is about fifty miles northwest of the Gate. After just two days they returned with ten tons in their hold. News of the catch created a quick resurgence of excitement. When the
Viking
tied up at the Union Fish Company's dock most everyone around hurried down to see what kind of price the sharks would bring.

“I'll bet they don't get over twenty dollars,” I remember Joe La Rocca saying.

“Hell they might not even buy 'em,” someone else said.

Secretly I hoped he was right. For, though I desperately
needed the money, I still could not face the risks involved, the uncertainties and complications. I felt safe with things the way they were. But I'm sure no one in that crowd of hungry fishermen shared my feelings. A ruddy glow diffused their heavy Sicilian cheeks: their clear, dark, predatory eyes looked on with hawklike alertness. In that atmosphere of greedy expectancy, where the smell of fish entrails mingled with the tang of creosoted pilings and the heavy garlic breath of the fishermen, only one man, a shadowy observer, appeared detached from the whole tense scene. I do not remember what he looked like, only that a feeling of quiescence seemed to emanate from where he was standing, alone, in a far corner of the shed.

Nothing happened until late in the afternoon when half a dozen of the biggest fish buyers in town showed up. With them was a man in a gray business suit whom no one had ever seen before. The twenty or more fishermen who gathered stayed together talking quietly in Italian. Then Karl Hansen, the
Viking
's owner, climbed up on a box and asked for bids.

“Holy Christ,” Joe shouted, “they're going to auction them off.”

Tarantino started the bidding at twenty dollars.

“That's about what I figured,” someone said, gloomily, “the whole thing was too damned good to be true.”

But just then the man in the gray suit said he'd go one hundred.

“He must be off his rocker,” Joe said, “or else there's something going on we don't know about.”

After that we just stood there with our mouths open, staring, as the bids jumped from two hundred to five hundred to seven hundred.

“Anybody go eight?” Karl Hansen asked tensely.

The man in the gray suit raised his hand then immediately took out his check book and those of us who were close enough saw him hurriedly write out a check for eight thousand dollars. Printed on the check was the name of one of the biggest pharmaceutical houses in the country.

The next minute every fisherman in the place was running for his boat, that is, everyone but me. I was too sick at heart, too filled with despair to care about anything.

After a time I walked down to the
Blue Fin
and sat, disconsolately, in the wheelhouse. Where would it all end, I wondered, close to tears. Why was it that I alone was always singled out for failure? I looked out at the
Blue Fin
's big afterdeck, at the stout sideboards and the heavy planked hatch cover and thought of the big empty fish hold below. Suddenly my despair turned to anger.

“If you'd get off your dead ass and do something,” I said to myself, “you could pull out of this mess in no time. Borrow the money, outfit the boat and get the hell out there before you blow it again.”

It was the same kind of thinking that had jolted me into buying the boat in the first place and then into taking out parties. Now, as if I had been brutally slapped into consciousness, the prospects loomed, not only enormous, but easily attainable. Then, as if this wasn't enough to stimulate me to action, just as I was leaving the Wharf I met Joe La Rocca unloading his pick-up.

“You heard the latest?” he asked, excitedly and, without waiting for a reply, “Some nut up in Eureka is paying eighteen hundred dollars a ton,” he shouted, jubilantly, “so they've pegged the price at eighteen hundred all along the coast. Think of it,” he cried, pounding me on the back, “That's damned near a dollar a pound for them stinkin' sharks.”

Perhaps all this was too much for me. Perhaps I didn't really believe it. One way or the other I did nothing. And the weeks passed. I made plans to borrow the money and convert the
Blue Fin
. I talked to fishermen, learned where they'd caught their sharks, studied their fishing gear. I became an expert without ever catching a fish. Yet in my own mind I felt at ease, as if all my financial troubles were over, as if at any time I liked I could just run out the Gate and make my fortune. All that spring I continued to haul fishing parties.

Meanwhile just about everything that could float had put to sea. Purse seiners from Monterey; halibut boats out of Puget Sound with names like
Helga, Leif Erikson, Gjoa
; crab boats and trawlers from Eureka; and salmon trollers from San Francisco, all were fishing sharks. Even rowboats with outboards could be seen far out on the ocean. Many fortunes were made and there were many reports of drownings.

In midsummer, Joe La Rocca bought a new boat, a fifty-foot diesel fully equipped that must have cost ten thousand dollars.

“Take the gear off my old boat,” he said expansively, “and get out there before it's too late.”

But still I did nothing.

Then two misfortunes befell me almost at once. An amendment to a law regarding party boat licensing had been passed. Through some oversight on my part, I'd failed to comply with the new regulations and my license was revoked. That very night when I got home, my wife announced she was pregnant again.

It was already late in October. The shark fishing season, I knew, would soon be over. Yet, once again, with the energy born of desperate necessity, I installed the power
gurdy from Joe La Rocca's old boat, got together the necessary fishing gear and, although I had wasted the best of the spring and summer months, I finally took off for Half Moon Bay some twenty miles down the coast where the shark fishing at that time of the year was best. I went alone, figuring to pick up someone there who knew the water. I anchored off the little town of Princeton on the first of November. It was on the second day of that month I first saw Ethan May.

The fish buyer at Princeton told me about him.

“If you want somebody that will get you fish,” he said, “get this guy May. He's a weird one but he's honest,” the buyer went on. “He'll probably make you some kind of damn fool deal, but if he does, take him up. You won't lose. Only you'd better get out there quick because once we get a south blow, you can figure that'll be the end of the shark fishing for this year. And next year they'll probably be making Vitamin A out of seawater or garbage and sharks won't be worth nothin'.”

That afternoon I had passed at least fifty boats working along the twenty fathom bank off Montara and Pillar Point. I had pulled alongside several and they told me they had been averaging better than a half ton per boat per day, and that a few of the bigger boats had gone over a ton. Eighteen-hundred dollars in a single day, I had thought, and had been dizzy with the excitement of it all the way in to the anchorage.

“Get hold of him for me,” I said. So the buyer got on the phone and called somewhere and in a few minutes was talking to Ethan May.

“Yeah, sure,” I heard the buyer say, “a big boat. Maybe good for twenty tons.” I couldn't hear May's voice. “OK, I'll tell him,” the buyer said. He hung up and laughed.

“You got yourself a deal,” he said. “I told you the guy's weird. He says he'll go out for two days with you and you can have the first three tons if he can have all over that. I figure you'll be damned lucky to get a ton this late in the
year, so I said OK.”

Three tons, I thought. Fifty-four hundred dollars. I lit a cigarette and tried to appear calm.

“A share for each fisherman and one for the boat is the usual thing.” I said, trying to appear professional. “How come he makes an offer like that?”

“Who knows?” the buyer said, a little irritably. “He lives alone. He's got nobody. Probably he gets a kick out of playing his hunches. You got yourself a deal so I wouldn't worry if I was you.” He concluded abruptly. “He'll be in on the seven
A.M
. bus which stops in front of the hotel.”

Still in a daze, I left the buyer's office and in the short November twilight, walked out on the pier to watch the boats unload. A long line of them, mostly crab boats, waited in a big half-circle extending a quarter of a mile down the bay. One by one, they came forward and tied up between the mooring floats at the end of the pier so the swells could not smash them against the pilings. The boom from the loading hoist swung out over the fish holds. The men on the boats put slings around the tails of the sharks and the hoist lifted them up in dripping clusters onto the scales on the dock. They were deep water fish, bottom feeding from their sand gills and, as they swung head downward, their air bladders hung like fat red tongues out of their big crescent mouths and their heavy guts pushed forward, swelling out their white, blood-streaked bellies between their big flapping pectoral fins. Hanging that way with their bellies bloated made their long tails look even longer and thinner while their wide set eyes stared sullenly out of their flat, long-snouted, gray-green heads. A man with a broom pushed the blood and disgorged slime into the water while the gulls, darkly white in the evening air, swooped down in screaming clouds upon
the reeking refuse.

As I stood there on the pier's end with the dark ammonia-like stench peculiar to sharks—a smell I was soon to know more intimately—permeating the darkening air, I gazed at the clusters of blood dripping flesh that by some freak of circumstances were worth some five hundred dollars a sling load. My revulsion and possibly pity for those disfigured brutes jerked so brutally out of their homes in the sea's depths was overcome by thoughts of the load I would be bringing in myself; of the four or perhaps even better than five thousand dollar check I would get from the fish buyer. I thought of how my wife who at that moment was probably feeding my two undernourished children with leftovers from the previous meal's leftovers would react to such unbelievable good fortune.