The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel

by Peter Benchley

  “How did you catch him?” Jo asked again.

  “I didn’t catch him,” Paloma said. “He’s not caught.”

  “He’s dead, then?”

  “No.”

  Indio was looking through the bucket. “Look at ’em all! This place is a fish market! It’s a gold mine!”

  A surge of nausea swept through Paloma and made her dizzy. Though she still hung in the water, she felt beads of sweat form on her forehead.

  “I told you,” Jo said to Indio. “I knew she wasn’t coming out here to study shrimps.”

  “You were right.”

  “You didn’t believe me,” Jo went on. “ ‘Let’s stay here,’ you said. A lot you knew.”

  “Okay, okay,” Indio said. “I said you were right. I admit it. I take it back. Now let’s get at ’em!”

  As if on cue, Manolo threw a baited hook overboard and fed the weighted line through his fingers.

  “Don’t!” Paloma shouted.

  Manolo laughed. “There are fish down there. Are you saying I can’t fish for them? That’s what fish are for. To fish for.”

  “You’re wrong.” Paloma pulled herself toward the bow of her boat. “You’re not so important that God put anything on earth just for you to kill.”

  With one hand, Paloma grabbed her anchor rope; with the other she reached back into her belt and pulled out her knife and slashed the line that moored the other boat to hers. The line was taut, for the strong tide wanted to pull the boat away, so the sharp blade sliced through the fibers so quickly that they made a popping sound.

  Immediately, the bow of Jo’s boat swung wide, tangling Manolo’s fishing line in the limp mooring line, and the boat slid away down-tide.

  Furious, Jo leaped to his feet, cursed Paloma, and yanked on the starter cord of his outboard motor. The cord came away in his hand. He cursed the motor, and cursed Paloma again, and the cord, and all boats, and the sea. He rewrapped the cord and pulled a second time, and the motor sputtered and died. He cursed spark plugs and carburetors and gasoline.

  Paloma clung to her anchor rope and watched Jo teeter in the stern of his boat and nearly capsize. Then she saw a puff of blue smoke and heard the outboard roar to life and saw the boat swing in a tight circle and head back toward her. Quickly, she pulled herself aboard her own boat, for she knew that Jo’s rages were sometimes blind and violent, and he was capable of threatening to run her over with his boat. She didn’t believe he would actually do it, but he might hit her by accident.

  Aiming directly at Paloma’s pirogue, Jo kept his motor at full throttle until he was only ten or twelve feet from her, then cut his power altogether. His boat stopped six inches from Paloma’s, and it caused a swell that lifted her boat and tipped it and almost spilled her overboard.

  Manolo, cheeks livid with anger, whipped his bow line around her anchor rope and made it fast. His fishing line was wrapped in a tight spiral around the bow line. He tried to unravel it, but every time he freed a loop of fishing line, the loop behind it kinked and doubled. He took a knife from his belt and cut the fishing line and snarled at Jo, “If you can’t make her behave, I will.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jo said. “I’ll take care of her.”

  “Jo, look!” said Indio, who had put the glass-bottom bucket overboard and was surveying the seamount. “Cabríos. Dozens of them. And goldens! And jacks! Jesus, a million jacks!”

  Jo looked at Paloma and said, mocking her, “Not much out here, eh? Not many groupers. Just the same old stuff. I knew I couldn’t trust you.”

  Paloma was stunned. “You couldn’t trust me? Who was it who said he wanted to learn to dive?”

  “I do, I do.”

  “To study things, to learn about animals.”

  “I do.”

  “No. All you want to do is kill things.”

  “No,” Jo said, and he grinned. “I want to kill things and then I want to learn things. When I can sell enough fish to get enough money so I can get out of here, then I’ll learn things—in Mexico City.”

  Paloma took the knife from her belt again and moved forward toward the mooring line.

  “Paloma,” Jo said in a tone reminiscent of Viejo’s martyr voice, “don’t be so silly.”

  “Give up, you mean. Let you kill everything here.”

  “There you go again, exaggerating. Even if I wanted to I couldn’t kill everything on this seamount. If we take something, something else comes in to replace it. The sea goes on forever, you ought to know that.”

  “That’s nonsense. You could wipe out the whole place.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, but … what do you care, anyway? We won’t take your precious oysters.”

  “What? I …”

  Jo smiled. “Didn’t think I knew, did you?”

  What does he know? Paloma wondered. He can’t know about the necklace. He can’t. He’d spoil it. If he knew, he’d find some way to spoil it, just to get back at me for … for what? For succeeding where he failed?

  Paloma stalled. “Knew what?”

  “That you take oysters from here. You’re so pure, you never take anything from the sea, sure, sure. Well, I’ve seen oyster shells in your boat.” Jo chuckled. “Or that thing you call a boat.” He looked around and was pleased at the appreciative smiles from Indio and Manolo.

  “A couple of oysters,” she said, relieved, and she added for emphasis, “to eat right here. That’s all.”

  “That’s what we want: a few fish to sell. That’s all.”

  “Jo …” Paloma hesitated before continuing. “Papa wanted this seamount saved, left as it is. He told me we had a kind of trust, that we had to preserve it. It … it was his favorite place.”

  Jo flushed. “I know that. You think I didn’t know that?” The words spilled from his mouth. He turned to Indio and said contemptuously, “Of course I knew that. You heard me say that.”

  Indio looked quizzically at Jo, but said nothing.

  Then Jo glared at Paloma and shouted, “Papa is dead, Paloma! Dead, dead, dead!”

  She put her hands to her ears, for she did not want to hear.

  “I don’t care if he told you to save the whole world! He is dead, and what he said doesn’t mean a damn! Do you understand that? Not a God damn! It is what I say that makes a damn, and I say I am more important than your stupid fish!”

  There was nothing more Paloma could say, and so she raised her knife to cut the mooring line.

  “That won’t stop us.”

  “Yes it will. I’ll pull my anchor and go. You’ll never find this place again.”

  “I’ll buoy it.”

  “I’ll cut your buoys away.”

  “I’ll take landmarks.”

  “You?” Paloma sneered. “You couldn’t find your way around the house with a landmark. You don’t know how.”

  “I can learn.”

  Paloma knew he was right. He could learn to take landmarks, and once he had the skill, he could find the seamount as easily as she did.

  “Look, Paloma, we don’t have to fight like this.” Jo was trying to sound reasonable. “We can work it out. We can still be friends.”

  Paloma had been looking away from him. Now her eyes snapped back to his face, to see if he was purposely mocking her. He was looking intensely sincere.

  He said, “I’ll make a deal with you.”

  “What deal?”

  “I won’t tell anybody about this place. It only makes sense that I’ll keep my word; after all, it’s good for me, too. We’ll fish it with lines only, no nets. Anything we catch that we can’t use, we’ll throw back.”

  Paloma saw that Jo’s mates were eying him as if they thought he had lost his mind, but they stayed silent.

  “You have to admit that’s fair,” Jo said. “I don’t have to do anything. I could come out here and throw dynamite overboard.”

  “You could,” Paloma agreed. “But you know that if you did”—she hoped her voice had a tone of quiet menace—“I’d get revenge. Som
ehow, someday, you’d pay.”

  Jo roared with laughter and slapped Indio on the back, but there was a brittle quality to his laughter, for Paloma was—physically, at least—an unknown and thus an unmeasurable adversary. He was bigger and stronger, but he seemed to sense that she was quicker and smarter, and driven by a passion that gave her courage.

  Paloma thought about Jo’s “deal” and concluded at once that it was no deal at all; it was a not-very-subtle kind of blackmail. If Paloma agreed to let them fish as often and take as much as they wanted, they would not spoil a good thing by spreading the word to their competitors. If she harassed them by cutting away their bait and their boat and their buoys, they would broadcast the location and its richness.

  Worse still, Paloma doubted that they would be able to keep their end of the agreement. It was inevitable that one of them would find himself in a conversation in which he needed something to brag about, a feat that would set him apart from and above his rivals. And once the existence of the seamount was known, its location would follow speedily.

  It was also inevitable that before long Jo and his mates would begin to fish with nets. The temptation would become too great to resist. It would be like placing a plate of Easter sweet rolls before the three famished boys and recommending that they eat no more than one apiece because there would be no more when that plate was gone. They would see huge schools of cabríos and jacks beneath their boat, and each flashing body would ring in their minds as a silver coin. They would be catching four or six or fifteen fish on their lines, and they would begin to speak of the immense fortune that was swimming away from them because they could not use nets. Then they would agree to try the nets just this once, to see how many fish they could catch—an experiment, they would say, that’s all. They would catch hundreds and hundreds, and there would be no satisfying them with less. The seduction would be complete.

  They would tell each other (and believe the words) that fishing with nets was fine and just, because God had given man dominion over all the animals.

  “What about it?” Jo said. “Do we have a deal?”

  Suppose she said no. Suppose she declared open war on them. It was possible that she could make their days on the seamount so miserable that they would leave. It was more likely, though, that their response would be to confide in a few of their friends and bring two or three more boats out with them. Paloma would be overwhelmed. They would begin to use nets; life on the seamount would end even sooner. She had no choice. By agreeing, she might buy time.

  “Okay.”

  “Smart,” Jo said. “Very smart.” Like a military commander ordering his troops to advance, Jo gestured at Indio and Manolo, telling them to start fishing. Obviously, he was enjoying himself enormously: He was the leader who had negotiated a favorable truce that exploited his enemy’s weakness, and now he would deploy his forces to reap the rewards of his wisdom.

  Paloma watched as Indio and Manolo baited hooks and dropped their weighted lines overboard. She put on her mask and leaned over the side of her boat and looked down into the water.

  The manta was still there, still immobile, ten feet below the surface. The fishing lines passed four or five feet in front of the manta’s left wing. If the manta were to decide suddenly to leave, and if, as usual, it gained momentum by slowly raising and lowering its wings and gradually flying forward, its left wing would collide with the fishing lines. It might brush them aside and proceed unharmed. But if the wing were to strike the lines solidly, and if there were tension from above and below—preventing the slack that would be needed to permit them to buckle and slide aside—the lines might slice through the flesh. Or they might lodge in the flesh, as the fisherman’s nets had, and bite deeper and deeper as the manta struggled.

  The injury would be similar to the one Paloma had just treated, but more severe, for the thin monofilament line could cut through the flesh and, perhaps, even amputate part of the wing. The outcome then would be certain death.

  Paloma put on her flippers and slipped the snorkel through her mask strap.

  “Where’re you going?” Jo asked.

  Manolo called out, “Stay away from my line.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jo said to him. “We made a deal. She knows she better not fool with me.”

  Paloma said nothing. She rolled over the side of her boat, breathed deeply, and dived to the manta. She checked the wound and saw that the flesh she had packed in was staying firm; it had not begun to unravel and shred. Perhaps it would heal and grow. Without the constant abrasion of the ropes, probably it would not get worse.

  There were no predators or parasites nearby, which told Paloma that the manta was not emitting distress signals. Its mechanisms must be gaining confidence of survival. And that made her feel good.

  What the manta did not need, however, was a new injury. So, after Paloma had examined the wound and patted it and gently stroked the flesh around it, she hovered above the furled horn on the right side and reached down and pressed on it. She wanted to guide the manta, and since it had responded once before to her touch on one of its horns, she was guessing that the horns were as sensitive as a horse’s mouth and that the manta would react to pressure on its horns by moving in a way that would relieve the pressure.

  When the manta did not respond at once, Paloma pressed harder, bending the horn toward the bottom. She felt a shudder as, somewhere deep in the core of the giant, a message was received, almost as if a command had been given for the boilers to be stoked, the engine to be started, the vessel to be moved. Silently, the right wing dipped, the left wing lifted, and together they heaved once up and down. The pressure pushed Paloma away and forced an explosion of bubbles from her mouth. When the bubbles cleared, she saw the manta bank to the right and keep rolling, like an airplane in a spin, as it flew toward the bottom.

  Jo had watched this through his viewing box on the surface. Now, as the others held their lines, he took up a honing stone and began to rub it in tight circles against the point of a harpoon.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Manolo asked.

  “The deal just said no nets.”

  “But what you gonna stick?”

  Jo gestured at the deep water where the manta had gone. “He’ll be back.”

  Manolo whistled. “There’s a few pennies.”

  “I told you I’d take care of you.”

  “You did?”

  “Sure. Remember? I said all you had to do was tell me where she’d gone, and I’d take care of the rest.”

  “Oh.”

  “You two stick with me and we’re going to be fine,” Jo said, smiling. “Just fine.”

  Below, Paloma watched the manta swim toward the bottom. It was on its back, showing its brilliant white underbelly, and as it arrived at the rocky top of the seamount it continued its slow and easy roll, spinning and descending, like a child falling down a sand pile, until the black of its back became one with the dark water of the abyss and Paloma could see it no more.

  She wanted to follow it, to roll with it down the side of the seamount, to make discoveries with it and be part of the harmony of the sea.

  Instead, her body sent her signals that told her she was very much a human being and that if she intended to continue to be a live human being, she had better ascend.

  On her way up, she continued to look down, happy that she had been able to help the manta, hoping that it would survive, sad that in order for it to survive it would probably have to stay away from this seamount that was no longer a sanctuary, and—struck by this last realization—suddenly very angry.

  At the distant limit of her vision, something was moving, thrashing violently. For a second, Paloma thought it was the manta—perhaps it had snagged a fishing line, or been attacked by something—but then the animal was drawn a bit closer, into her field of focus, and she saw that it was too small to be the manta.

  Then, as it drew still closer, she could see that whatever it was was struggling to return to the bottom, fig
hting something that was forcing it to the surface. Because she had never seen such sights on the seamount, it was two or three seconds before she realized what she was watching: a fish caught on a hook, being dragged up to the boat.

  And then the fish was only a few feet from her, struggling less and rising fast, and she saw what it was and felt a rush of bile into her throat: a triggerfish—exactly like the one, perhaps exactly the one, she had seen valiantly defending its egg cache.

  Impulsively, she put out a hand, hoping to grab the line and free the fish, but she was too far away, and before she could move closer, the fish had passed her. She looked up through the last three feet of water between her and the surface and saw the fish, limp now with exhaustion, splash into the sunlight and disappear into the shadow of Jo’s boat.

  She reached for the side of her own boat, broke through the surface and spat out her snorkel, and, choking, shouted, “Put it back! Quick!”

  Manolo looked at her as if she were mad. “What?”

  “Throw it back!” Paloma gasped. “You don’t have much time.”

  Manolo looked at Indio, and they smiled and shook their heads at one another.

  Manolo said, “I’ve got all the time in the world.”

  “But … you …” The words were a jumble in Paloma’s mind. Thoughts crossed over thoughts, and they all bunched together and blocked each other out. She wanted to, had to, tell Manolo that the triggerfish must be returned to the water immediately; that in less than a minute the sun would begin to harm its skin and cause ulcers; that in only two or three minutes, the fish would asphyxiate, for it could not draw oxygen from air; that it was probably already in some kind of shock from the struggle on the line but that it might survive if it could get back into the soothing salt water now.

  But in spite of all she wanted to say, nothing came out of her mouth except, “… you don’t understand.”

  Again Manolo smiled, and what should have been obvious to Paloma all along now struck her like a blow to the head: It was she who hadn’t understood. And what she hadn’t understood was that Manolo had no intention whatsoever of returning the triggerfish to the water, that he regarded the triggerfish as fairly caught and rightly his, and that he would consider anyone who tried to prevent the fish from dying in the bottom of the boat to be a thief.