The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (15 page)

He turned and looked at Paloma’s boat in time to see her pull her killick aboard and cast his boat away from hers. He shouted, “Hey!”

“I have to go home,” Paloma said calmly. “Put down your own anchor.” Then she knelt in the pirogue and raised her paddle.

“But where’s the bottom?”

“Right there,” Paloma said, pointing vaguely to a spot in the sea a couple of hundred yards away. “You can’t miss it. Not a fine navigator like you.”

The others were already hauling in their lines, and Jo rushed to bring his aboard. He shaded his eyes and squinted at the shore, hoping to recall landmarks barely noted when he had approached the seamount. He started the outboard motor and put it in forward gear at half throttle and aimed it against the tidal flow, reasoning that to recapture the seamount all he would have to do was reverse the direction of his drift.

“Put the bucket over,” he ordered Indio. “Tell me when we’re there.” They had not been drifting long, so he assumed he would be directly over the seamount within a few minutes.

Indio put the glass-bottom bucket over the side, then gripped it tightly with both hands, for the movement of the boat against the strong tide tended to tear the bucket from him. All he saw below was blue.

“Well?” Jo said impatiently.

“Nothing.”

“You got to be wrong.”

Indio looked up from the bucket. “Kiss a goat. Look for yourself.” Indio snickered and added, “Mister fine navigator.”

Jo put the motor in neutral and took the bucket from Indio. The tide caught the bow of the boat and swung it wide to the left and pushed it half a circle around, then struck the stern and pushed it after the bow: Slowly, the boat was drifting in circles. Jo paid no attention. He stared through the glass-bottom bucket at the endless carpet of blue beneath him.

“Impossible!” he said.

Manolo smiled. “A miracle!”

“God’s will!” chimed Indio.

“Shut up!” Jo said. He brought the bucket aboard and put the motor in gear and gave it full throttle. The boat lurched forward, rose to a plane, and traveled several hundred yards before Jo got his bearings and turned the bow against the flow of the tide. He continued up-tide until he judged he had compensated for his movement sideways, then stopped and told Indio to look again.

“Nothing.”

Manolo said, “I think you’re way off to the side.”

“I can’t be,” Jo insisted.

“You could be above it,” Indio suggested. “You traveled long enough.”

“No. Did you see how far we drifted?”

Manolo said to Indio, “There’s only one thing for sure: He doesn’t know his butt from his bucket about where he is.”

Jo said, “You could do better?”

“I couldn’t do worse.”

Manolo looked at Indio, who looked at Jo and shook his head and murmured, “What an ass.”

Jo was confused. His command was unraveling, and he could not deal with sniping from two people at once. And so he focused on one, on Indio, and said, “Get out.”

“Get out of what?”

“The boat.” Standing in the stern, Jo pointed at the sea.

“Get out of my boat.”

“And what?” Indio said, laughing. “Walk home?”

“I don’t care. It’s my boat, and I say get out!”

“And I say”—Indio mocked his imperious tone—“go suck a lemon!”

Jo took a step toward Indio, Indio grabbed the bulwarks on either side of the boat, the boat yawed dramatically, Jo lost his footing and started to fall overboard. To save himself, he twisted in mid-air and fell across the motor. The motor was hot, and Jo yowled like a scorched cat and pulled his hands away from the motor and lost his balance and rolled into the water. He hit head-first and went under for a second and came up sputtering and clawing for a hand-hold.

Indio guided his hand to the side of the boat and said, feigning concern, “What’d you do that for? You always tell me you don’t like swimming.”

Jo gurgled and sputtered and tried to utter a threat, but all that came out was drool.

“If I were you,” Manolo said, “I’d get back in the boat.”

Jo struggled to haul himself aboard and then lay panting across the after thwart. He scowled at the other two, and
hated them for forming an alliance against him, hated them for seeing through him, hated them for making fun of him, hated everything because there was nothing he could do about anything. Except …

Jo shaded his eyes and stood up and looked across the water. Far away and moving still farther, appearing from this distance no bigger than a piece of driftwood, was Paloma’s pirogue.

If she hadn’t cast them loose, none of this would have happened. They would not have lost the seamount, and, in trying to find it, Jo would not have suffered the collapse of his authority. All he had left to give him superiority over Indio and Manolo was his boat, and that was not enough. They could always find someone else with a boat.

What he hated most about the collapse of his façade was that he had been so careful, so meticulous in erecting it. By being extracautious on the sea, he had assured that his seamanship had never been tested; by staying in the same fishing spots, he had never had to try his nonexistent navigational skills; by announcing that he wanted to learn to dive, he had scored points for courage, while knowing full well that once he had stolen from Paloma the secret of her seamount she would never agree to teach him anything.

He didn’t care about the respect of others except insofar as it encouraged them to help him reach his goal—the acquisition of enough money to leave this island and get away from this wretched sea and into a city, where life depended on the function of mechanical things that he could create and care for and repair.

Here he was a misfit, and he knew it, but he had survived. Until now. With a single thoughtless gesture, Paloma had destroyed his credibility with Indio and Manolo. The only way to restore that credibility was to destroy its destroyer, to
prove once and for all that he was stronger, more worthy, than Paloma. And such a proof would settle more than the matter of the moment: It would avenge the humiliation he had felt when his father had replaced him with a girl.

He would bring her to her knees before him. She would acknowledge his superiority, beg for his mercy, promise to obey him, and … He would think of other things when the time came.

Jo turned and yanked on the motor’s starter cord. The motor caught at once, which he took as a good omen, and he pushed the throttle open and spun the boat around.

“Where are we going?” Manolo asked. Pounded by the thumping bow, he half stood, letting the muscles in his legs absorb the strain.

“She’s gonna put us back on that seamount,” Jo shouted above the noise of the engine.

Indio said, “I bet we could find it ourselves.”

“If we had a week,” Jo replied. He poked a finger at Indio’s chest. “Every minute we’re not fishing that seamount, she’s costing us money. She’s costing
you
money. You want to go to La Paz and fly on an airplane and see things and meet people?”

“Yeah. You know that.”

“Then blame her that you’re stuck here.” Now he pointed at Paloma’s pirogue, which was growing larger and closer every moment. “She’s the one got you chained to the island; she’s taking the money from your pocket.”

“I never thought of that.”

“Well, think of it. Because we’re gonna stop it right now.”

Paloma was more than halfway home when she heard the outboard bearing down on her. Immediately she sensed Jo’s mood—if not his precise intention—because the engine noise broadcast an unmistakable message: Only someone ignorant
of boats or out of control would run an engine at full speed in the open sea. It was dangerous to the sailors and damaging to the engine. Jo knew boats. The engine pitch was at peak hysteria, and so too, Paloma sensed, was Jo.

It had probably been a mistake to cast Jo’s boat loose, for she had known he would soon be lost. He had never learned how to interpret tides and currents, couldn’t differentiate the subtle shades of blue and green that would tell him how deep the water was and what kind of bottom was below. What she could not have known was how vulnerable he was, and how quickly his embarrassment would change to rage.

Paloma stopped paddling and waited, for there was no point in trying to outdistance him. She wondered if there was anything she could say that would defuse him. The engine noise came closer, a shrill and painful scream. She looked up and saw the white hull rise out of the water and slam down, spewing rooster tails of spray from both sides of the bow. The boat was aimed directly at her.

Still she waited, now shaken by a new possibility: Might he actually ram her pirogue? Could he be
so
stupid? He might sink the pirogue, true, but he would certainly damage his own boat as well. She wondered if she should jump overboard and go underwater and wait for him to pass. But then he might take her boat. Besides, it was a cardinal rule that you never abandoned your boat unless it became absolutely …

They were upon her.

The white bow rose over her and came straight at her, and for a split second she thought she would be crushed. Then, suddenly and violently, the bow skewed off to the left and she had a flashing glimpse of Jo’s face and the shrieking motor before a mount of water struck the pirogue and lifted it nearly vertical. Paloma threw herself against the far bulwark, against
the lean of the boat, and it righted itself and settled into a trough. Quickly she steadied herself and stood up to see where Jo’s boat had gone. She had to know where he was so she could see him if he came at her again.

The boat was thirty or forty yards away, turning in a tight circle, running over its own wake, caught in crisscross patterns of swells and chop, the motor spewing smoke and screeching as the propeller bit through pockets of air instead of water. Manolo stood in the bow, bracing himself with the anchor rope, his head thrown back, laughing. Indio sat amidships, steadied by an arm pressed against each bulwark. And Jo knelt in the stern, turning the boat and aiming it once again at Paloma.

This time he turned away a second sooner—Paloma was able to keep the pirogue from capsizing simply by shifting the weight in her knees and balancing with her hands—and then he stopped. His boat wallowed a couple of feet away.

“Get aboard,” he said, indicating his boat.

“Why?”

“You’re going to take us back to that seamount.”

“Find it yourself.”

“I’m not asking you; I’m telling you. Get aboard!”

Without thinking, Paloma raised a hand and ticked the thumbnail off her front teeth at Jo. As soon as she had done it, she knew it had been a mistake, for the rude gesture compounded the effect of her refusal: It showed not only defiance but contempt. Jo blushed, and Manolo and Indio exchanged snorts of amazement, for neither of them had ever seen a female make that gesture to a male. It was beyond insolence; it was unthinkable.

Jo put his boat in gear and turned away, and Paloma could see the veins in his neck protruding thickly. He drove the boat perhaps thirty yards, then turned again toward her.

“One last time,” he called to her. “Will you take us back to the seamount?”

Silently she shook her head.

“Yes you will. I gave you a chance to do it the easy way, but if you want to go the hard way, that’s okay with me.”

She heard his engine yowl as he revved it in neutral, and she knew what he intended to do. He wanted to capsize her, to separate her from her pirogue so that she would have to beg him for a ride, and he would pick her out of the sea only if she would take him to the seamount.

But she would not give in, would not surrender the seamount, would not betray herself and her promise to her father just for the sake of putting money in Jo’s pocket. If he wanted the seamount, he would have to find it himself and take it himself. She knew that eventually he would find it, but it would not be with her cooperation. Meanwhile, for as long as he wanted to upset her pirogue, she could keep it upright by balancing with her hands and knees. Soon enough he would get bored, or decide that he had made his point, and he would go away.

Then she saw the oar.

His boat was directly in front of her, his bow facing hers. He always carried two oars, in case his motor died and he had to row home, and now he had fit one into an oarlock and had directed Indio to hold it horizontal, so that most of the hardwood shaft stuck straight out from the side of the boat and the oar blade was turned so its sharp edge faced straight ahead, straight at Paloma.

Again Jo gunned his engine in neutral, the way an airplane pilot does before takeoff to make sure the engine will give maximum power at the critical moment. Together, Jo and his boat seemed to be some strange monster pawing the sea, preparing to charge.

Now, for the first time, Paloma felt genuine fear, for she knew she had badly miscalculated. She was no longer dealing with Jo, but with a mindless, violent creature who had surfaced only once before and whose single appearance had finally and irrevocably ruined Jo’s relationship with his father.

The scars caused by Jo’s panic underwater had healed. Jobim had not only forgiven him but had even come to regard the episode as his own fault for having pushed Jo too hard. Jobim had taken Jo’s training back a few steps and had proceeded more slowly, more gently.

They had still been a team.

It was late summer, in a lull between the migratory cycles that mark the end of one fishing season and the beginning of another. Every year at this time, the islanders had a fiesta. It was an ancient festival that had been going on since well before Viejo’s memory, must have gone on even before the time of the Spaniards, for some of the masks that some of the children wore represented old gods (their names long since forgotten) that lived here before the Christian God.

The centerpiece of the fiesta was a fishing tournament. Anyone could enter and could fish with anything he wanted—hooks, harpoons, spears—anything except nets. The winner was the fisherman who returned with the most weight of fish.

Jobim had entered the tournament every year, and every year he came in last. He had no interest in prizes, no need for public approval, no fondness for catching masses of fish. What amused him about the tournament was the challenge of trying to catch fish in ingenious ways, ways that gave the fish a more-than-even chance.