The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories (9 page)

“But that would be more than five times what she's worth, and about fifty times more than I paid for her,” I said. “You wouldn't be getting much of a deal.”

But when he insisted, saying he had no need for the money, I agreed to let him have the
Blue Fin
. By the time I'd gotten the check with its five perforated figures from the fish company and was heading back to San Francisco on the night bus, the keg was alongside and May was pulling it aboard with the boat hook. In an instant, my little fantasy vanished.

I threw the engine out of gear and stood by the wheelhouse door watching the buoy line come up. The little breeze, steadier now and blowing from due south, felt warm on my face and a little moist. Probably a good wind was blowing high up for here and there big patches of blue came through the milky haze that had covered the ocean all morning. The line, snapping little sprays of water, sped upwards in a businesslike manner, silent and tight as a bow string, as May, with his ever-turned-down boots, widespread for balance, received it from off the power gurdy and coiled it in neat hard circles on the deck. When the small kedge anchor, its flukes and shank dark with slime-green mucky sand and exuding the repugnant smell of some strange decay, came over the side, the first shark could be seen turning slowly in the murky water.

Once more, as on the night before, a dreamlike quality came over everything. The long gray snout of the hooked shark shot up from the water, the spatulate pectorals flapping like grotesque ears, the distended belly showed white in the translucent darkness and then, with no pause whatever in the relentless, beltline motion of the thick manila,
the whole length of the slow-thrashing, muscular body was dragged out and, with the aid of May's heavy steel gaff, slid through the two vertical guides of the starboard roller. Then May, in what seemed but a single, uninterrupted movement of his strong body, slit open the throat, disengaged the hook and kicked the squirming soupfin clear of the incoming line. I stepped back quickly into the wheelhouse, shoved the gear lever forward and brought the
Blue Fin
about so that the line came in on the lee side a few points off the starboard bow. I set the throttle at a slow idle and went back on deck to help May.

No sooner was the first shark aboard than another was coming over the side. And then another. Without even noticing the rancid blast from below, I began throwing the big, twisting fish into the hold. I ran, dragging the sharks by their tails. I skidded, fell, leaped up and ran again. I counted, not to myself now, but aloud, shouting out the numbers in a chanted beat. And still they came, like from the magic salt mill, a steady, unending flow. In no time at all the hold was full. Sharks spilled out and covered the deck. Once I grabbed May's gaff and, leaning far out, sunk the steel hook deep into live flesh. The thrashing weight unbalanced me and I was half over when May's hand, like a vise on my arm, pulled me back. I fell against the wheelhouse biting air, then was up again and away. In the open hold heaped up sharks writhed, their tails slapping softly, blood sheathed bellies revolving, abrasive, sand-gray and violet backs arching and twisting, crescent, serrated mouths agape in their strange and silent dying. Across the deck dozens more rolled about. Blood-black, phlegmy slime clung to the gunn'ls and sideboards. In the scuppers the bodies of young sharks, disgorged from pregnant females, squirmed weakly like soft, blind tadpoles. Forward beyond the heavy
sideboards, a big one twisted and snapped itself into the water. I snatched up the axe and in a frenzy danced about, battering in the heads of every shark that moved. And all the while my skinny body, incited by some demonic fire, darted this way and that, scraggy bearded, uncut hair flying, two days' accreted filth on pants and shirt, leaping, squatting, smashing, killing and shouting out numbers in a shrill voice, all the while May's apocalyptic figure, unperturbed, deliberate and infallible, stood bigger than life, by the grooved iron wheel of the power gurdy, all certitude, all rhythm, a procession of dependabilities like the diurnal tides or the equinoxes.

The set was in and May was clearing away a space for the tubs when I finally began to look around and take notice of things. No less than a thousand soupfin sharks filled the hold, the forepeak and the entire deck from forward of the wheelhouse to the area May had cleared just aft of the hatch. I stumbled inside and threw the engine out of gear, then leaned against the wheelhouse and, with my arm dangling limply, gazed over the monstrous cargo that shortly would be hoisted, slingload by slingload, onto the pier at Princeton, weighed in and evaluated at some forty-five thousand dollars. Yet at the moment, I would have given up everything, my share of the catch and the remote possibility of any of May's share too just to sleep, to sink down right where I stood and drift off into utter forgetfulness.

“We still have time for one short set if you feel up to it,” May said, studying the water and the sky to the southwest. He had just finished sloshing his arms and face with seawater from the bucket. Now he shook the water off his hands and came over to the wheelhouse looking as clean and fresh as if he had just bathed. “It probably won't blow much until around dark.” His voice was as quiet as ever. There was no
sign of weariness either in his movements or expression, or, any sign of special satisfaction about the forty thousand or so he had made in less than two days. The fact that there were still some working hours left seemed, at the moment, to be his only concern.

The thought of going through the ordeal of another set, even a short one, seemed more than I could take. Besides, I thought bitterly, I would still not get a cent more than my original amount. And then, and for the first time that day, a quick and terrifying image of the big white-breasted gull with its gray-white body twisting in the water passed like something cold across my brain. I flicked my cigarette over the side.

“Well,” I said in a thin voice, “I guess we'd better get them while we can.”

I did not look at May, but out over the ocean. Except for a few swiftly moving clouds, the sky had cleared. The water, for some reason, had changed to an inky black.

May immediately began getting the set ready. First he separated five of the tubs and, after cutting the line, made the free end fast to the kedge anchor. Then he got out the last of the sardines and started to bait. There was nothing now for me to do, so I went below and put on a pot of coffee. While I waited for the water to boil, I sat down at the table and lit another cigarette. After a couple of drags I stumped it out, scraped off the burnt end, and lit it again. The smoke felt hot in my throat and besides, it was making me sick. But since I didn't want to put it out again, I just sat there holding it and flicking off the ashes. From up forward came the soft thump of a wave against the hull. The
Blue Fin
lurched a little, then righted herself. I glanced up through the open scuttle. A small cloud bundle, crossing under the sun, turned the sky as dark as a winter twilight.

May's sheet of writing paper lay where he had left it on the table. I pushed aside the box of hooks and studied the big, carefully printed letters that filled the entire space between the guide lines. It looked like the efforts of a child learning to write, simple, diligent and unsuspecting. Yet at the same time I could feel there something ultimate, something just beyond my reach but in some way discernible. And looking at it, at the child's simple efforts, I could see May's strong fingers working away, his pale green eyes concentrated and serious, yet neither shadow nor flame. And then I saw him all at once, a composite of remembrances. And seeing him that way, with the mid-afternoon sun fading and brightening and the
Blue Fin
lifting and falling more and more sharply gave me such a quick and poignant feeling of sadness that I had to wipe my eyes with my blood stiffened sleeve to clear away the start of tears. In a moment, the whole feeling passed. Yet I continued to sit there, puzzled and at the same time embarrassed, still flicking the ashes off my unsmoked cigarette and I could only explain my strange melancholy away by the fact that I was probably getting a little hysterical.

The coffee came to a boil, foamed over the sides of the blackened pot and, before I could reach it, put out the flame. I poured in some cold water to settle the grounds and was fumbling around cleaning up the mess when May came below. His face was as placid as ever. He had washed off his sea boots so that the black rubber glistened. Even the fabric lining of the rolled down tops had been well scrubbed.

He took off his skull cap, folded it neatly and slipped it into his trouser pocket before he sat down. There was nothing left in the locker but a half box of salted crackers and the remains of some peanut butter. I put these out on the table along with a couple of cups of the steaming,
iodine-colored coffee, and sat down opposite him. But again, as at breakfast and on deck a little while before, I could not look up at him.

By the time I got back in the wheelhouse and May had taken his position aft by the stern roller, the entire aspect of the water had changed. The sea had become the ocean with its cool smell of distance and its vast, curving emptiness. I swung the
Blue Fin
about as the little wind that had picked up came in off the starboard bow. Through the windows that had already caught some spray, I could see here and there along the crests of the dark hills rolling up from the southwest, white tongues snapping skyward with sibilant whisperings, eerie in that big silence, then falling off, making white foam patches down the lee slopes. Though it was still early afternoon, the sun seemed to have gotten smaller and the sky darker. And just above the horizon to the south and west, a low cloud bank, like a weld on the seam between the sky and the water, was now visible.

The area May had cleared was so cluttered from gear that he was forced, in order to keep from stepping into the tubs, to stand with one foot on the gunn'l and the toe of his other foot in one of the scuppers. Since we had but one buoy keg left, he picked up the anchor that was made fast to the end of the set line and, motioning me ahead, tossed it out over the stern with no buoy line. The heavy iron stuck with a soft clunk, the line snapped taught, and then the big hooks, as though suddenly inflamed into fiendish action, leaped hissing from the rims of the tubs, whipped through the rollers and into the waves.

I took a quick check on the compass, then looked out again to the southwest. The cloud bank was higher now, lead gray and flat on top. In the distance, the water looked lumpy, with a kind of confused turbulence as though
something were going on below. Close by low, fast-running waves had begun to build. They came on erratically, veering this way and that, yet maintained a general course somewhat oblique to the direction of the big swells. The sun seemed to have drawn back deeper into the sky and to have shrunk to half its normal size. At that moment a wave struck up forward. The
Blue Fin
shuddered, lunged steeply and then the heavy spray crashed with the sound of a dropped barrel on the cabin deck. I pulled the wheel hard to starboard and then turned quickly to see how May had made out.

Nothing had changed. The blood-black line uncoiled with the same angry haste, the upflung hooks hissed evilly in their short fast trip through the rollers and May, bracing himself by some extraordinary muscular counterbalancing, stood poised, hardly swaying, as the stern swung up over the water then fell sharply back. Poised that way with his sheath knife in his hand and his head thrust a little forward, he looked like the cast figure of some classical hero portraying, by means of this quickly changing backdrop, two alternating views of man, the one, intense and alert, a tight spring, in the midst of rushing water, flying hooks and wild, churning wake; the other, when sharply silhouetted against the clear dark sky, a lofty ascendance that could almost have achieved some sort of omniscience or otherworldly purity except for the little black tassel bobbing and tumbling about as merrily as ever linking the two together and making them one.

Suddenly the sky and all the ocean darkened. It lasted only a moment and then it happened. I saw it first only as an obscure movement like a quick shadow or maybe even a thought or a feeling. Yet when I saw it, it was as though I had known all along exactly how it would be, as though I
had had a working drawing somewhere in my mind all the time. The rolled down top of one of May's boots had brushed against a tub and a hook had slipped over the cotton fabric lining of the creased edge. It was just lying there. And then four things happened almost at once. My hand flew to the throttle. Automatically my foot went to the reverse gear lever. My mouth opened to shout. And then I froze. I could not speak. I could not move. I could only stare, paralyzed as the big hooks whipped savagely from off the tub's rim, one second per hook, not more and not more than five seconds to the hooked boot. I thought about nothing. I'm sure I thought about nothing. My mind had stopped. Then, as in a dream, a nightmare, the boot rose from the deck, not high, but just as though May were stepping over the stern and out upon the waves. His arms spread wide, his head turned slightly as if to speak. Only nothing was said, nothing at all. His lightly bearded face was as calm as ever. Only now it was gentle. Suddenly the line tangled. The tub leaped off the deck, crashed between the vertical rollers and exploded, scattering its wooden staves in all directions. Then with a soft, wet snap, the line parted.

With a violent surge of energy, I shoved down the reverse gear lever and opened the throttle wide. My heart pounded. Thin whining noises came out of my throat. The
Blue Fin
trembled and the bow began to swing. I leaped across to the door of the wheelhouse and looked over. Deep in the waves I could see the vague twisting bundle of gray and white that was May's sweatshirt and the bald top of his head and then the frayed end of the line, waggling away and out of sight. The black skull cap, top down and partly filled with water, was already half a boat's length away. I threw the engine out of gear and stumbled out onto the heaped up
sharks on deck. The spot where May had gone down was lost in an instant. There was nothing anywhere, nothing at all but the silent inbound passage of the waves. A cool, steady wind was blowing now. There was no smell to it, only the feeling that it had come from a long way off, an unspeakable distance, from nowhere and going nowhere.