The Forty Fathom Bank and Other Stories (8 page)

I was standing at the wheel thinking rather dreamily of how it would be to fish with May on a permanent basis, of going south with him in the summer for albacore and broadbill, then working north for sharks if they were still in demand. Yet, though I was thinking about this and at the same time was pleasantly aware of the
Blue Fin
's heavily laden roll as she entered the ocean swells, the island with its rock rimmed beaches ringed by tidal spume and brown sea grasses and its lonely light tower kept intruding with dark persistence into my consciousness like the memory of a place I'd only dreamed of.

Suddenly all my good thoughts vanished and I found myself irresistibly drawn back to a disturbing experience I'd had when I was a child.

I was eight years old at the time. An aunt of mine was going with some fellow who had worked as a lighthouse keeper on Unimak Island up in Alaska. From the stories he told me, it must have been one of the most desolate places in the world, with nothing but rocks along the coast and some kind of tall grass inland. The weather was either so
foggy you couldn't see anything, or it was blowing a full gale. The light station and the bleak promontory on which it stood was known as the Roof of Hell. On his annual visit to San Francisco he would usually bring my aunt little gifts from up there, some of which she gave to me, like a colored grass Indian basket, a pair of moccasins made of wiry haired white seal skin (I could still remember the rawhide smell) and some mounted walrus tusks with fine, black-lined etchings of dogs pulling sleds, old sailing ships and some Eskimos spearing walruses. He would tell me about the big Kodiak bears he had hunted, about fishing for giant crabs and migratory salmon.

But the story that impressed me most was the one about a big Japanese freighter that had been abandoned in a storm in the Bering Sea. The wind had driven her on the rocks not far from the lighthouse on Unimak Island. When the storm was over he climbed aboard and looted it of cameras, guns, binoculars, no end of foodstuffs, and even a couple of crates of Christmas tree ornaments so that, just for the hell of it, he had said, he and the other two men at the station cut themselves a tree and celebrated Christmas in the middle of August.

As might be expected, I was pretty much carried away with all this and thought of nothing but getting up there myself. But when I asked him if he would take me with him sometime, he just looked me over and said that that was no place for a skinny little kid like me, but if I ever got bigger and got some beef on me he might give the matter some thought.

I remembered quite clearly how helpless and frustrated he made me feel when he told me this. As a matter of fact I was so filled with rage that, had I been strong enough, I would have killed the lighthouse keeper with my bare
hands. In fact, for a long time after I had fantasies of doing just that.

Probably because of the impending change in the weather, the usual flock of excited gulls, sweeping and crying over the stern, was nowhere in sight. I opened the window and listened. Faintly from the rocks on the seaward side of Año Nuevo came the short, hollow bark of a lone sea lion. It was the only sound of life.

May had gone back to his baiting as soon as we had gotten under way. His wide shoulders and heavy arms seemed to fill up his old sweatshirt so that the rounded outline of his powerful muscles could be seen clearly beneath the worn gray cotton. The little black tassel on his perfectly centered skull cap bounced from side to side as he worked, but seemed to have lost all its former gaiety.

By eight o'clock, or thereabouts, we were back in the vicinity of the forty fathom bank. The water, with its faint yellowish cast near shore, now turned to a kind of ominous green. Except for the long low swells, lifting and falling as if in a feverish sleep, there was no movement, at all. We took our soundings and when the tallow on the lead showed green sand and the depth was right on the forty mark, I brought the
Blue Fin
around to a southerly course and May put out the first buoy keg with its bamboo pole and black flag for a marker.

Soon the long set started, hissing ominously as on the day before. Only now I detected an even more sinister quality in the accelerated uncoiling of the blood dark manila as it slithered upward and out of the tubs. In fact, as I remember quite well, everything around me seemed sinister, the pearly haze, the thick morning air and the tumid seawater. And the oppressive closeness of the sky along with the complete dispersion of the familiar and, in
its way, comforting hard-lined horizon gave me a feeling of being entombed. I found myself consciously breathing deeper. Even so, I had trouble filling my lungs. But all this, I thought, was probably nothing more than the after effects of my earlier confusion and would soon pass away.

When the baited hooks began their headlong plunge, May, after removing the hatch cover, went aft with his unsheathed knife and stood by the stern roller ready to cut any of the hooks that might foul.

The
Blue Fin
pounded along with hardly a roll, though now and again the bow, catching a swell just right, flung a low spray that disappeared aft with a muffled splash. No shoreline was visible through the haze, but for the first time that morning I felt a faint breeze through the window that was not from the forward motion of the boat. Fortunately it had come just in time to blow the stench from the open hold away from the wheelhouse. Yet the breeze, though no more than a whisper, started me thinking of May's prediction about the weather. Again, as in the cabin, a creepy feeling came over me and a kind of numbing cold spread through my chest. My stomach too began to give me trouble with little burning pains and rolling cramps down low. I turned and looked back at May, half expecting to see some awesome transfiguration or even, hopefully, to discover that he was not there at all and that the entire experience was nothing more than a frightful dream.

But there was no change whatever. May was still standing by the roller balancing himself easily with one foot on the deck, the other resting lightly on the combing. Except for his gray slacks tucked loosely into his sea boots, and his quaint black skull cap with its bobbing tassel, he could have been the model for some Winslow Homer
Portrait of a Fisherman
. Despite my rampant fear and upset stomach,
at the sight of his sturdy figure there, his discerning eyes concentrating on the rapidly descending shark line, I was aware of an immediate sense of calm.

Feeling pleasantly sure of myself, I was about to return to the wheel when I noticed that something was wrong. Since I was heading south, the keg with its marker flag should have remained due north on the compass. Instead, it was moving slowly in an easterly direction which could only mean that it had broken loose from the buoy line. Though I knew we could manage with one float, for some reason the sight of the keg drifting off that way disturbed me. I left the wheelhouse, and shouting back to May, pointed toward the keg that was quite small by now but still bright red against the water. But apparently May was already aware of what had happened. He turned, and shrugging unconcernedly, said in his usual quiet voice that we could get along all right with the remaining keg and went back to tending the line.

In spite of his reassurance, I could not rid myself of the uneasiness I felt at the loss of the buoy keg. For the remaining time until the last buoy went over, I kept thinking of the set stretched out two hundred and forty odd feet down in that vast silence and deep gloom with one of its lines cut and the buoy, indifferent and insensible, drifting away and out of sight over the ocean. Though it was not unusual for me to worry unnecessarily about things of little consequence, my concern for the lost keg was out of all proportion to its importance. It even occurred to me that some secret part of my mind might possibly be busy with things I knew nothing of. However, once the engine was stopped and May and I were sitting at the table drinking coffee and eating the last of the bread and some tough-edged Swiss cheese, my uneasiness left me.

“The sharks might hit pretty well today,” May said when he had finished eating. He leaned back on the bunk and puffed on his pipe. “I think they know what goes on up here. They know when the weather will change and when feed will get scarce. Probably they have some kind of extra sense we don't know about.”

It was the longest single statement I had heard May make. His voice was unreservedly warm, almost chatty, as if he'd finally accepted me as his friend. Suddenly it occurred to me that, quite probably, he'd been as uncertain of me as I had been of him and, until he knew me better, had confined himself to pertinent observations, to the business at hand. He opened his old black suitcase, rummaged about for a moment, and came up with a tablet of writing paper and a new yellow pencil.

“We have enough bait for one short set after this one,” he said. “Then we'd better get back before it blows.” He broke the cellophane wrapper on the tablet and, carefully squeezing it into a ball, tossed it into the paper bag he had set out for garbage.

Somehow this change in May seemed to clear away the last vestige of mystery surrounding him, revealing, no more nor less, the simple fisherman his license had claimed him to be. With immense relief, I realized I was no longer afraid.

I was reflecting on all this yet at the same time considering the prospect of still another set following the one still to come in. A thousand hooks and another half a thousand more. For the next five or six hours, I pictured myself working in a state of exhaustion hauling in these squirming tons of soupfin sharks. The hold would be full and they'd be all over the decks and probably down in the cabin too. They'd represent more money than most men ever saw in a lifetime. Yet when I was all through, I'd get nothing,
absolutely nothing for all my labor. And there wouldn't be another chance tomorrow or probably ever again. There was no doubt about it now, the weather was changing.

Suddenly, like the cellophane wrapper in the garbage bag, I felt myself squeezed into a tight ball. With a rush of anger all my night thoughts returned. I lit a cigarette and flicked the still burning match on the deck.

“This whole damn deal was no good to begin with.” My voice was tight and I could almost feel the pallor on my face. “I must have been nuts to have agreed to it.”

Anger surged up into my throat. For the first time in my life I didn't want words, but some kind of violence. Then suddenly I could feel the deep flush burning in my cheeks. I glanced at May. He had not even looked up. He opened his tablet on the table, adjusted the black lined paper under the top sheet and, with an expression of serious concentration in his pale green eyes, began printing something in large capital letters. When he had finished with his writing, which turned out to be only his name and address at some hotel on Bush Street, he carefully tore out the paper and, weighting it with a box of Kirby hooks, looked over at me with an expression of such ingenuousness and goodwill that I wondered if possibly my impulsive outburst of a moment before was just a figment of my imagination.

One way or another, it was a disturbing little scene, and I was glad when the
Blue Fin
was under way again and we were heading toward the black flag that marked the set's end and May was setting the tubs in a row alongside the power gurdy preparatory to bringing in the line.

The little breeze was strong enough now to dimple the tops of swells and to make the flag flutter on its bamboo pole. As we approached the keg, my head suddenly began to pound and my grip on the wheel got weak. It lasted only a moment and, I suppose, was caused by my thinking about the sharks that might already be on the line. Despite the fact that none of them would belong to me, once I got to thinking about them, my mind seemed to turn immediately into a regular calculating machine. A thousand hooks, I thought. One every fifth hook. Two hundred sharks times fifty pounds would be ten thousand pounds, divided by two came to five tons, multiplied by eighteen hundred would be nine thousand dollars. I went over all this several times, savoring the taste of the final figure which, because of other probabilities such as a shark on every fourth hook and then every third, increased progressively to something like thirty thousand dollars. Then I began to think about May again. I pictured the
Blue Fin
loaded. We were heading back to Princeton. I was at the wheel and May stood beside me smoking his pipe.

“I've been thinking,” I imagined May saying in his quiet voice, “that maybe you'd want to sell the
Blue Fin
.”

“I'd be willing to sell her,” I said. “I'd even be glad to. But it's this way. I have a wife and two kids up in the City and there's a third one coming. I'm not much of a fisherman, but if I didn't have the boat I'd have no way of making a living.”

May kept puffing away on his pipe. His familiar sympathy was almost palpable. Finally he said, “I'll make you
a deal. You let me have the boat and I'll give you my share of the sharks.”