The Girl of the Sea of Cortez (9 page)

“Good. I want to see all the things you see. Tomorrow?”

Paloma spoke quickly. “No, not tomorrow. I’ve got … too many things to do.” She had nothing to do, but tomorrow
was too soon. She had to have time to think about what Jo could have in mind, for she could not believe that his request meant only what it said. Too many things about it were unlike him.

“Soon, then.”

“Yes. Soon.”

Jo stood and yawned and said good night and walked through the front door and disappeared into the night. His room was around the corner, connected to the house but separate in that it had its own entrance from outside. That was one of the privileges a boy acquired when, at the age of fourteen, he underwent the elaborate, old-fashioned mystical ritual of becoming a man. As far as Paloma could tell, all the ritual accomplished was to give the boys privileges. It didn’t make them men; it called them men.

Paloma and her mother shared a corner of the main room of the house. Neither of them had any privacy in their home at any time of the day or night.

Now Paloma thought how strange it was for Jo to have asked for her help in anything. This was a significant concession: For him to acknowledge that she—a girl—might know more about something worthwhile than he did was remarkable.

She would have to be careful with Jo, take each step cautiously and try to fit it into an overall picture.

She was surprised to find that she truly cared about what these changes in Jo might mean, and she realized it was a reflection of her loneliness, of the quiet desperation she had felt as she paddled home from the seamount that afternoon. To get along with Jo, to establish a relationship, perhaps even to make a friend—that would be a fine thing for Paloma, who had never had a friend.

T
he last time the relationship between Paloma and Jo had resembled a friendship had been when Paloma was five and Jo was four: Back then, they had played together happily. But soon Jo had found a pack of boys to run with, and Paloma had found herself either taunted or excluded, and she had begun to hate being a girl.

Then Jobim had taken Jo away, and left Paloma to Miranda, to be raised in Miranda’s image. The two children had less and less—and finally nothing—in common.

Then had come the break, the reversal from which Jo had not recovered, when Jobim had returned him to Miranda and had taken Paloma with him, to make her the special one.

Still, for a long time Paloma had believed that it was bad
to be a girl. For a while, she had dressed like a boy, cut her hair short like a boy’s, learned to laugh at jokes directed at her—as if laughing
with
the joke, saying, “Yes, isn’t it ridiculous to be a girl? Aren’t I foolish? Well, I won’t be a girl for long, and then we’ll all have a good laugh at what I used to be.”

Jobim—as a male who had never wanted to be anything else—could not have understood the depth of the anxiety and confusion Paloma was feeling. But he knew generally what was wrong, deduced that it had to come from her being the only girl of her age on the island, and guessed that her feelings about herself and her sex were jumbled, confused.

So one day Jobim had taken Paloma fishing. She was quite young then and had never before been taken to sea. In fact, she had rarely been in Jobim’s boat, except for holiday excursions to visit the sea-lion rookery and a few trips to La Paz.

They were alone in the boat, and Paloma was thrilled. She did not ask why she had been excused from her household chores, or where they were going. She was to be on the sea with Papa, and that was enough. The last thing she could have imagined was that Jobim intended the journey to alter Paloma’s view of herself.

The sea was oily calm, so flat that the soft swells looked like bulges in a jelly, and Paloma had been able to kneel on the forward thwart and hang out over the bow of the boat. The sharp wooden prow sliced through the water like a fine blade through flesh. She thought of the surface of the sea as the skin of a huge fish, and of the bow as a knife that was filleting it for market.

Jobim had anchored the boat in what seemed to Paloma to be the middle of the sea. Actually, the boat was directly over the seamount, but Paloma had never yet been underwater,
so she had no idea that the sea bottom was a landscape of different terrains. As far as she knew, the bottom was distant and dangerous, an unknown country, like death.

Jobim had baited a big hook with half a needlefish, but he did not throw the line overboard. Instead, he handed her a face mask and snorkel and told her to put them on. Then, with his own mask propped up on his forehead, he told Paloma to jump overboard and hang onto the anchor line.

“Here?” Paloma was shocked. In the middle of the sea? “Why?”

“I want to show you something about girls,” Jobim had said, and though what he said made no sense to her, she obeyed and slipped over the side.

Jobim jumped into the water and hung beside her, holding the anchor rope in the crook of an elbow so as not to drift away in the current. Slowly he fed the fishing line through his fingers, dropping the baited hook down toward the seamount.

Paloma’s first sight of the seamount was breathtaking, a discovery as miraculous as if she had been given a secret glimpse of heaven, for here was a world she had not known existed. It was strange and very active and very silent and (she was surprised when she recalled it later) not at all threatening. It was almost like watching a film, for although the living that was going on down there was not far away, it was somehow separate from her world, unquestionably real but wonderfully new, enchanted.

They lay together on the surface, their faces in the water, breathing through the rubber snorkel tubes. Jobim spoke to Paloma by rotating his head a quarter turn, until his mouth was out of the water, and Paloma could hear him clearly without moving: She couldn’t tell whether she was receiving the sound of his voice down her snorkel tube and through her
mouth or filtered through the few inches of seawater that covered her ears. Neither way made any sense to her, but she didn’t care: His words came through distinctly, though they did sound hollow and far away.

The nylon fishing line was soon invisible in the water, but the bait was unmistakable—a white morsel that dangled provocatively just above the bottom and moved, not with its own rhythm like a living thing in harmony with the current, but like a dead thing caught and held.

Small fish approached the bait and hovered around it, seeming to appraise it for delicacy and danger. Jobim had made no attempt to hide the hook, and now and then a glint of steel would flash in a ray of light. Whether the fish were not enticed by the needlefish, or were scared by the hook, Paloma could not tell, but none of them went for the bait.

Then they were gone. The small fish vanished. The bait hung unattended, swaying in the current.

“Where did they go?”

“Watch,” Jobim said. “Just watch.”

For a moment or two, nothing happened. What had been a bustling community was now a barren plain. Paloma half expected to hear a clap of thunder or see a bolt of lightning, for such a change had to be the result of a natural drama.

And then, from the darkness at the edge of the seamount came the sharks—hammerheads, three of them, one half again as large as the other two: silent searchers moving with a relentless arrogance that broadcast their sovereignty over the seamount. Their bizarre, T-shaped heads swung slowly from side to side, gathering signals from the sea, interpreting them and sending out signals of their own. These soundless impulses preceded them everywhere, giving fair warning of their arrival, allowing all but proper prey to depart in safety.

Jobim jigged the bait, and though Paloma heard nothing
new, she could see that the sharks received the message clearly, for they swung, in formation, toward the dancing piece of meat. They circled it once, then again, and then one of the smaller sharks broke the circle and darted in at the bait. Jobim jerked the line, and the bait popped up and away from the shark’s mouth.

The three sharks circled again, faster now, each in turn shaking its head with a brusque, annoyed motion. They were perplexed, because something was not as it should be: They were receiving signals that reported dead meat, but the prey was not behaving as if dead.

The second of the two smaller sharks shot forward, and once more Jobim jerked the bait away. This time he did not let it down; he pulled it up toward the surface, challenging the sharks to follow it. Only one did, the largest. The other two hung below, angrily circling nothing.

The big shark did not attack the bait. It followed patiently, with sinuous grace. As it drew near, Paloma saw that this animal, which on the bottom had looked like a good-size fish, was enormous—bigger than she, bigger than Papa, almost as big as Papa’s boat.

Paloma was terrified. She trusted Papa totally, knew that she would jump off a mountain or swallow needles if he said she should, but to play games with a big man-eating shark …

Unable to take her eyes from the advancing shark, she flailed with her free hand, desperate to grab the gunwale of the boat and pull herself to safety.

“Stop it,” Jobim said. “Lie still.”

Paloma lay still, but she was sure the shark could hear her heart. Were they like dogs, could they smell fear? She held her breath, hoping to mute the timpani in her chest, but that only made her heartbeat seem louder.

The bait was six or eight feet away, and the shark a foot
beyond it. Jobim kept pulling, but now the shark stopped coming. It circled instead, the black eye on the end of its fleshy white “T” watching as Jobim reeled in the bait and, with a single twist, removed the hook from it.

Paloma turned with the shark, rotating like a flower petal in a tidal eddy, panicked that she might lose sight of the circling hunter: There was something unbearable about knowing that the animal was there and not being able to see it.

A movement below caught her eye. Now the other two sharks were rising. They kept their distance from the larger one, seeming to defer to it, but they were growing bolder. And though they were definitely smaller than the other shark, relativity was the only comfort: Her father was six feet tall, and each of these sharks was at least as long as he was tall.

Jobim held the half-needlefish out to the big shark and wiggled it with his fingertips. The circling pattern grew tighter. Now the shark was missing Paloma by only three or four feet as it swept by. The head was shaking actively, the crescent mouth opening and closing in expectant cadence.

Jobim pushed the needlefish out into open water, released it, and quickly drew back his hand. The shark passed by, and the fish disappeared. There had been no snapping, no biting, no shaking of the head. The shark had simply inhaled the needlefish.

It made two more tight turns around Jobim and Paloma, then gradually loosened its pattern, like a spring unwinding. Its black eye never left them, but there was no urgency to its behavior. It was waiting.

Jobim reached inside his shorts, undid a knot and came out with a whole needlefish. Paloma had not seen him do it, but in the boat he must have stuffed a plastic bag of needlefish inside his pants—out of sight of the sharks and, because the neck of the bag was tied off, out of their range of smell.

Immediately, the shark once again swept close by and resumed its tight circling pattern.

This time, Jobim broke the needlefish in two and shook both halves and then dropped them. As they fell, trailing bits of meat and puffs of oil, Jobim tapped Paloma’s arm and motioned her to watch.

The smaller sharks sensed the food and rose toward it eagerly, hungrily, their heads shaking quickly. At the same time, the large shark dropped its head and raised its pectoral fins and snapped its tail back and forth, which drove the body downward like a spear.

For a moment, it seemed that the sharks must collide. All three raced toward the pieces of fish, which continued to fall together.

Paloma saw that the small sharks were bound to win, for the needlefish was falling toward them and away from the bigger shark.

When the pieces of needlefish were no more than a foot from the mouths of each of the smaller sharks—when their victory was inevitable—both, simultaneously and inexplicably, turned away. The big shark soared down upon the pieces of fish, sucking in the first piece then turning away and making a wide circle and letting the second morsel fall—utterly casual, confident that there was no hurry, that the food would be there for the taking—then banking and descending in a dive and gobbling the last bit of food.

The smaller sharks continued downward, away from the large one, away from the food, away from conflict. They shook their heads and hunched their backs and flailed their tails.

They’re like puppies, Paloma thought. They’re angry and upset and there’s nothing they can do about it, so they’re running around yapping and chasing their tails.

The big shark returned and began once again to circle. Jobim motioned to Paloma to climb back into the boat. She didn’t hesitate. Keeping her eye on the shark, she reached up and gripped the gunwale and pulled herself to the side of the boat. She took a deep breath and tested the firmness of her grasp on the wood. When Jobim had first taught her to swim, he had told her always to get in and out of the water quickly, for it was in the marginal moments—half in, half out of the water—that a person was most vulnerable to shark attack: It was then that the person looked truly like a wounded fish; most of the body was out of the water so it appeared smaller, and what remained in the water (lower legs and feet) kicked erratically and made a commotion like a struggling animal.