Jobim could not dive that deep. No one he knew could dive that deep. In fact, as far as he knew, no normal person could breath-hold dive to 132 feet. To dive that far would be like crawling down a tower made of two dozen men standing on one another’s shoulders, or like falling from the top of the tallest building in La Paz. There would be no bottom visible for more than half the way down, and when and if you got more than half the way down, from there you wouldn’t be able to see the surface.
But Jobim knew enough about his own capabilities to be willing to try—not to go all the way, but to go far enough so he could see the bottom. So he hyperventilated and sped hand-over-hand down the anchor line, toward the blue-black mists, through the gloom where there was no up and no down, until he could see the top of the seamount far below.
He went farther, waiting for the body signs that would tell him to stop, and before they came he had been able to see enough to need to see no more. From 90 or 100 feet he had seen most of the top of the seamount, and the landscape told an obvious tale.
The soft corals and sea fans were lying on their sides, ripped up by their roots like a tree in a chubasco. Many of the hard antler corals were broken into small pieces among the rocks. The vegetation of most of the bigger rocks was covered with a layer of sand. One brain coral the size of a bathtub was split in two, and its halves lay in a sand valley like slabs of melon.
There were fish—a few small ones darting in and out of the rocks, and a good-sized cabrío that looked healthy until suddenly it flipped over on its back and swam in frantic circles, and one moray eel, dead and wedged into a crevice as if by a swift surge of tide.
The seamount had been devastated by a series of quick, terrible storms whose force had killed nearly every living thing and had maimed the survivors.
Had nature sent the storms, Jobim would have been sad. But he knew they were caused by men, and he was angry.
Fishermen from another island—Santu Espiritu, a few miles away—must be coming here at night and tossing overboard sticks of dynamite with long waterproof fuses. Long fuses were for the protection of the fishermen: A fuse too short would burn down too fast, and the dynamite would explode too close to the boat, cracking open the bottom and perhaps sinking the boat. But long fuses were a disaster for the seamount: They burned all the way down to the bottom, so the dynamite exploded not in open water (where its concussive force would kill the fish in the immediate area) but among the rocks and sand and coral, where pressures would build and channel and spread, killing animals in their dens and destroying the seamount itself.
Underwater, dynamite was a much more terrible weapon than it was on the surface. In air, a stick of dynamite—not packed in anything to contain and amplify the explosion, like rock or cement, not covered with anything to shatter and become shrapnel, like glass or pebbles—wouldn’t do much damage beyond about ten yards. It was said that the detonation of a single stick of dynamite underwater could be felt more than half a mile. It could cause havoc over an area of thousands of square feet.
After the explosions, the fishermen would spread nets on the surface and scoop up the corpses of the animals as they floated up from below.
This was a quick, economical, and final kind of fishing. No risk of damage to expensive lines and hooks. No need for baitfish. Everything on the seamount was killed instantly. No time-consuming wait for a fish to bite. Best of all, the fish came to the surface on their own; you didn’t even have to pull them up.
It was efficient and illegal and universally condemned as immoral, sacrilegious, and self-defeating, for everyone knew that it destroyed fishing grounds and could only hasten the day when whole communities would be forced by starvation to become (the ultimate nightmare of them all) beggars on the streets of Mexico City. Even the worst louts among fishermen considered dynamite fishing beneath contempt.
But Jobim knew enough about certain kinds of people, about how stupidity and brutishness and greed could combine to drive a person to do things that even a moment’s rational thought would perceive as destructive, to self as well as others. It was the promise of great profit at little expense and no risk, of quick money in the hand right now and don’t worry that there won’t be any more when the fish are gone. Someone else can weep over that. I’ll get mine while I can, and other people can worry about themselves.
It was the same mentality that led the company that made fertilizer in the city to pump its chemical wastes into the harbor. The company got rid of its wastes, which was economical and good. The government, however, began to think that it wasn’t a good idea to keep pumping chemicals into the harbor where people swam and fished, so it told the company to stop.
The workers had rioted and tried to burn down the government building, because they said the company couldn’t afford to haul its wastes elsewhere, and if it had to do so, some workers would lose their jobs and all would lose an impending raise in pay. The government backed down; the company continued to pump wastes into the harbor.
Two and a half years later, the harbor died. The chemicals had formed a poisonous sludge that coated the bottom and choked all the vegetation and shut off the oxygen in the water and killed every living thing. Guests at the luxury hotels, who swam in the harbor, began to come down with ghastly skin ulcers.
The government ordered the hotels to close and told the chemical company to stop pumping chemicals into the harbor. But the chemical company had made no plans to haul its wastes elsewhere, and so, compelled to stop using the harbor, it closed down.
Because there were no longer any hotels to stay in or restaurants to eat at or waters to swim in, the tourists and vacationers stopped coming to the city, and all the gift shops and boutiques closed and pitched their workers into the streets.
The workers at the chemical company had gotten their raise in pay, and for a few months had enjoyed the money. But because of their insistence on that new money they had lost everything. And it was not just they who were punished, but all the other workers who had lost their jobs. And eventually, “all” became everybody, for the city was deprived of a reason to exist, and slowly but inevitably it ceased to exist.
Nowadays it was a dusty cluster of empty buildings in a ring around the still-dead harbor, with the skeleton of the chemical company standing on a promontory as a reminder to passersby of the fragility of things.
But such lessons were hard to learn and easy to forget, and right then, over that seamount, Jobim had proof that some people still hadn’t learned. Almost everyone in the islands had a cousin, or at least an acquaintance, who had chosen quick and easy money at one time or another. Perhaps he had sold the fishing boat his father had left him and taken the money to the city where he intended to go into business for himself, not realizing that he was already in business for himself, the business for which he had been trained and at which he was as good as any in the world. And when he got to the city he found that it was already full of businessmen who were all too eager to relieve him of his money (which was certainly not enough to start a new business anyway), so very soon his money was gone and he was begging for a job cleaning toilets in the city comfort station and smelling, instead of fish and sea air, ammonium chloride that burned the lining out of his nose.
But those people, everyone’s cousin or friend, harmed only themselves and their families. These men from Santu Espiritu threatened to destroy the livelihoods of everyone on their own island, on Santa Maria, and on all the other islands as well. For they would not stop until they had cleaned out every seamount, every fishing ground they knew of, had heard of, or could find.
And Jobim knew what they would be saying to themselves, how they would be justifying behavior for which each of their mothers would have spat on them. They would say to one another, and hear one another say in reinforcing response, until they all believed it: If we don’t do it, somebody else will; people are no good, and the only ones who survive are those who look out for themselves, and survival, after all, is what life is all about.
So Jobim made a special trip to La Paz and went to see a boyhood friend, a man whose father had received and sold the fish for Jobim’s father many years ago. The friend worked in a salvage yard, where ships and boats and machines and cargoes and all sorts of other huge metal things that had been raised from under the water or saved before they could sink were brought to be restored or cut up for scrap.
Jobim and his friend had a beer, then two, and while his friend kept saying (time and again but in different words) that he envied Jobim for being able to be his own man and work at his own pace and live his life on the sea instead of in a place where the noise and the dirt were enough to drive a man crazy, Jobim kept asking questions about the newest methods and tools of salvage—especially about new ways of separating metals underwater, things like hunks of steel or parts of ships.
He said, finally, that a ferryboat had sunk near Santa Maria and was becoming a nuisance to the fishermen because it kept snagging and tearing their nets. The ferryboat was too big to move, but he thought that if he cut it into pieces, perhaps he could tow the pieces into deeper water where they would be out of the way. Would he need to hire underwater welders to do this? Would his friend’s salvage company do the job for him? Of course, he couldn’t pay much, but …
“Thing like that, you wouldn’t cut it up,” said his friend.
“Oh?” Jobim had known that all along, but he was trying to lead his friend into giving him more information without his friend’s knowing why—in case what Jobim had planned went wrong and any part of it was ever traced back to his friend.
“You’d blow it up. The new stuff we use cuts sharper than a knife and a hundred times quicker than a torch. You mix it, prime it, set it, fire it and POW! The job is done.”
“What is this stuff?”
“They call it PLS. It’s a liquid, two liquids. You carry it in two separate jugs till you’re ready to use it, because once it’s mixed it starts to generate heat and if it gets too hot it goes off by itself.”
“How much would I need to blow up a ferryboat?”
“Depends how big the ferryboat is and how many pieces you want it in.”
Jobim described his imaginary ferryboat. It was old and ratty and not too big, and it hadn’t been carrying anything of value when it sank. He wanted to be sure there was nothing about this boat that would be of interest to a salvage company. “How much do you think your company would charge to blow it up?” he asked when he was finished.
His friend shook his head. “We wouldn’t touch a small job like that.”
“I didn’t think so. This … PLS … you talk about, is it hard to use?”
“Easy. Anybody can do it, long as they’re careful.”
“Even me?” Jobim smiled.
“Someone good with his hands as you? A snap.” Then his friend saw where Jobim was taking the conversation, and he said, “But there’s a problem.”
“Where can I get some?”
“That’s the problem. You can’t. Have to have a license for it. It’s what they call unstable, and they don’t want just anybody to have it and leave it lying around.”
“How much would I need?”
“From what you say, a couple of gallons. Say, a gallon of each of the two parts. But you might as well want a ton. You can’t buy it.”
“Your company … wouldn’t have any extra …”
His friend shook his head. “If we did, we couldn’t sell it unless you get a license.”
Jobim didn’t know what to ask next. To keep the conversation moving, he said, “That ferryboat is costing a lot of people a lot of money. It’s taking food from the mouths of children.”
“I wish I could help you. If we were caught, we’d lose our business.”
“Of course,” Jobim had said. He didn’t want to push too hard and put his friend in a difficult position. “You don’t have any you could just … spill for me, do you?” He smiled again, to show his friend he was joking.
“That stuff you don’t spill,” his friend said with a laugh. “There’s no such thing as extra. After a job, what’s left over we have to throw away.”
“Where do you throw it?”
“In the sea.”
“Where in the sea?”
His friend waved his hand toward the water. “Right out there. Off Cabo San Juan.”
Jobim lowered his voice. “How far off?”
“Not far. Maybe a hundred yards. At the edge of the shelf.”
“How deep is the shelf?”
“Fifty, sixty feet. A lot of the stuff falls over the edge, though.”
“Some doesn’t, I bet.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“You throw it away mixed?”
“No. It could go off. It’s in its separate elements.”
“In cans?”
“In plastic bottles.”
“… that don’t rust.”
His friend nodded.
Jobim looked at the height of the sun in the sky and said, “I have to get back on this tide.” He stood and held out his hand to his friend. “It is good to talk with you.”
Shaking hands, his friend said, “One more thing, just for your … interest: The plastic bottles are different colors. It takes one red and one white to make a whole …”
“… a whole pink one.”
Jobim stopped at a store where they sold hardware and electrical parts. Then he returned to his outboard motorboat and made sure that both his gas cans and his freshwater jug were full, because the trip home could take anywhere from six to eight hours, depending on wind and tide. He told everyone at the dock that he was heading straight for Santa Maria, and he took messages from cousins for cousins, from friends for friends.
At the mouth of the harbor he turned right, which was the way home, and waved one more time. The people on the dock waved back and as far as they were concerned he was gone, which was true, although he stopped for a few minutes for a couple of quick plunges off Cabo San Juan.
For the next two days after he got home, Jobim stayed ashore and tinkered. He scavenged things from here and there and built things from this and that and endured all the teasing from his neighbors about how the schools of cabríos and jacks were running thicker than ever. People wondered what he was doing, and they asked delicate questions that hinted at the basic question—“What are you doing?”—but they never asked that outright. They all knew Jobim well enough to be aware that he permitted them to know about him only those things he wanted them to know.
Usually, when he was involved in an eccentric project, he let slip information little by little, and saved the final result as a surprise—at which everyone would either marvel (if it was a success) or laugh (if it was a splendid failure). When he failed spectacularly, he laughed harder than anyone. But, in front of children, he made sure they realized that failure was just as important as success because you had to fail in order to know that failure wasn’t worth fearing. If you feared failure, you would never try difficult things, and trying was more important than failure or success. (It was a lesson Jo persistently refused to learn: He loathed risks and was frightened by the unknown.)
This time, Jobim let slip no information about anything. He acknowledged only that he was working on some silly notion that was doomed to failure but that had preyed on his mind for so long that he had to play it out to its conclusion.
One night after supper, he told Miranda he was going for a walk, and he disappeared into the twilight. Much later, all anyone would remember was that they were positive they hadn’t seen him again that night. He hadn’t taken out his boat, that was certain, because many men were down at the dock cleaning fish and sewing nets; he hadn’t been entertaining the neighborhood children, because people recalled that that was the night they had taken turns ministering to the little girl who had been stung by a scorpion; and he hadn’t been in his own house until just before dawn. As far as anyone knew, he hadn’t been anywhere. (He confessed to Paloma that he had enjoyed causing the mystery; it added spice to the otherwise predictable daily routine of the island.)
In fact, he had gone to the opposite side of the island—uninhabited, wind-burned, rocky, dotted with little puffs of the hardiest vegetation—where there was no lee in which to keep a boat or build a house or even pass a moderately comfortable night.
He skidded and scrambled down the steep slope. About three quarters of the way down, he stopped at a hole in the rock face and tore away the branches he had stuffed into its mouth. Inside was a large plastic garbage bag and a wooden platform about three feet wide and six feet long, to the bottom of which had been attached, with bolts and ropes, four old automobile-tire tubes.
He dropped the platform the last fifteen or twenty feet into the water and, with the plastic bag slung over his shoulder, hurried after it and climbed aboard it. He positioned himself on his knees, at the exact center of the raft, with the plastic bag tucked between his legs. Like a surfer on a board, he began to paddle away from the island.
He had picked his night carefully: It was flat calm, so paddling was easy, and there was no moon. There was just enough of a ground swell so his little raft would not be visible in the starlight: An observer’s eye would be accustomed to a gently moving horizon; something as small as the raft would blend in. The timing and direction of the tide were exactly as he wanted them.
The Girl of the Sea of Cortez: A Novel Page 13